The historian says that while she was residing with Mather, “the cunning and ingenious child”—please mark the adjectives of the modern expounder, applied by him to one whom the earlier records put among those who “had been religiously educated and thought to be without guile”—“the cunning and ingenious child,” he says, “seems to have taken great delight in perplexing and playing off her tricks upon the learned man. Once he wished to say something in her presence to a third person, which he did not intend she should understand. She had penetration enough to conjecture” (why say conjecture?) “what he had said. He was amazed. He then tried Greek; she was equally successful. He next spoke in Hebrew; she instantly detected his meaning. He resorted to the Indian language, and that she pretended not to know.” Such are facts as deduced from Mather’s account by Upham and put forth by the latter, and which he attempts to account for by supposition that the girl’s own conjectures enabled her to get at the meaning of sentences put forth in languages of which she had no knowledge. No doubt she was bright, but not competent to all that. Fancy and imagination ply their wings needlessly when they rise from the ground of fact and fly off to the lands of conjecture and pretense, thinking to bring thence true solution of such a marvel. The girl avowed the presence of a spirit with herself, and that he helped her. That explains the whole transaction. Upon full separation from the body, each human mind loses all knowledge of earth language, having no further use for it, because the mind then enters conditions in which the thoughts of any other spirit, whatsoever its native language, may be read at a glance. Whatever language Mather might have spoken in, he would have been intelligible by any disembodied spirit. For not words, but the thought, irrespective of its dress, could be read. The Indian language she pretended not to know. Perhaps so; but probably that was no pretense. It is not probable that the girl herself, as such, had much acquaintance with any other language than English; any departed spirit who controlled her would have no knowledge of any earth language whatsoever, nor need he have, for unclothed thought was perceptible by him. A roguish mind behind the scenes—and such a one may have played many a trick at the parsonage—would be likely, at his own pleasure, to bother, astonish, or confound the Rev. Polyglot by seeming either to comprehend or not, just according to his own whims or varying moods as the play went on from step to step. Mather’s attempt to conceal his meaning from the girl might very naturally be amusing to the thought-reading intellect then lurking in and controlling the girl’s organs, and quite as naturally would incite him to play the wag a while. Martha neither conjectured nor pretended at all; she was then quiescent, while other eyes looked through hers and saw what was inside the mill-stone.
We have stated essentially that each mortal upon departing from this life enters into conditions where human language is not only not needed, but is unusable; therefore we may be asked how returning spirits can possibly speak to us in our language, which is no longer at their command. They measurably rechange or change back their conditions when they reconnect themselves with a mortal form; they then come back to where earth language is needful, and where fitting instrumentality for revival of knowledge and use of such language exist. They, however, do not reconnect themselves with their own former forms, nor often with forms which they can use as well as they formerly did their own; in many, very many instances, those who, in their own forms, were eminent for polished diction and fervid eloquence, either get such slight control or get hold of such rickety or such rigid vocal apparatus, that they can make no perceptible approximation to their former productions. The reincarnated spirit is a somewhat mystical being, half spirit, half man, and as a spirit can read the thoughts of man, and as man can use human language.
Flattery was sometimes poured over the minister through the lips of Martha, with a lavishness indicative of its flowing from some ensconsed waggish spirit, amusing himself by tickling the vanity of the egotistical black coat, much more than from a guileless miss speaking to her consequential minister.
A special scene is thus described by Mather:—
“There stood open the study of one belonging to the family, into which entering, she stood immediately on her feet, and cried out, ‘They are gone! They are gone! They say they cannot. God won’t let ’em come here!’ adding a reason for it which the owner of the study thought more kind than true; and she presently and perfectly came to herself, so that her whole discourse and carriage was altered into the greatest measure of sobriety.”
Very likely Mather was then egregiously cajoled by some one. Observation, together with information otherwise obtained, renders it obvious that one essential condition of psychological control is, that the magnetisms or auras of the controlling mind shall, at the time, be, in the mass of its operative qualities and powers, stronger than, or positive to, any other person’s spheres, auras, or emanations amid which the control is either to be taken or held on to. Suppose, then, what would be necessary under the circumstances, that the atmosphere, walls, and furniture of that study were highly charged with emanations from the vigorous minded Mather, who was then present, and consequently his own halo was radiating there and keeping his surroundings fully charged with himself. Physical and also external mental and emotional effluvia from him might then be so repulsive to magnetisms pertaining to spirits of any moral quality whatsoever, that no visitant from unseen realms would try to withstand the repulsion. If such was the condition of things, the parting exclamation of the last to remain, might well be, “They are gone; God won’t let ’em come here!” Such statement would be in full harmony with the most common use of language to-day by spirits, for they are accustomed to say that God won’t let them do this or that, when, according to their own oft-repeated explanation, they mean only that the forces of nature oppose or control them. God and natural forces with them generally mean one and the same all-dominating power—God’s forces as well as himself are called by his name by visitants who read his operations with more than mortal accuracy.
“She presently and perfectly came to herself, so that her whole discourse and carriage was altered into the greatest measure of sobriety.” Yes, naturally so; for Martha Goodwin herself resumed control of her own body, and re-exhibited the religiously educated and guileless girl which she in fact was, just as soon as usurping visitants vacated her legitimate premises. So long as her form was dominated by another’s mind, her existence was either a blank to herself, or, if conscious, she was powerless.
Upham teaches that once, according to Mather, when people attempted to drag this girl up stairs, “the demons would pull her out of the people’s hands, and make her heavier than perhaps three times herself.” Did the historian himself who quoted those words and let them appear to be accurately descriptive of facts, believe that they were such? Did he believe that demons acted within her, held her back, and made her something like three times heavier than she normally was? Such things were adduced by him as being facts, and it would be pleasant to know whether he believed that the girl herself was those demons, and by her own action made her own body three times heavier than common gravitation would make it. Did such observable effects occur as Mather described? Probably they did, and the historian’s process of accounting for them implies that by her own cunning, ingenuity, and histrionic skill, the child made herself three times heavier than she actually was. If the allegations were not in his estimation facts, why did he let them stand unaccounted for in his summary of things accomplished by his “cunning and ingenious child”? Perhaps he presumed that readers to-day are generally as ignorant as himself of the vast many cases in which the present generation has tested and proved by the best of Fairbanks’s scales, that spirits augment or diminish the weight of material substances at pleasure, and to as great and sometimes greater extent than either demons or Martha Goodwin are alleged to have done in the case above cited. He perhaps presumed that the reading world at large was as ignorant and prejudiced as himself on this subject, and that the world’s clearing and opening eyes will continue to see, as his glamoured ones did, only fibs in Mather’s facts. This was a sad oversight. Light from Spiritualism (see Dr. Hare, Dr. Luther V. Bell, William Crookes, Alfred R. Wallace, and many others) has already substantiated facts which prove that nature infolds forces by which agents unseen can at their pleasure produce either levitation or increase of the weight of material objects. Therefore such action may have been put forth upon the body of Martha Goodwin. Yes, we now may rationally believe that there existed too much sagacity and truth among the men of witchcraft times, and too little deviltry among the guileless children of that day, to permit that fictions and rhetoric shall long be suffered to malign our forefathers because they recorded true accounts of what transpired among them.
Mather states that this girl, at times, by whistling, yelling, and in other ways, disturbed him when at family prayers. Upham says, “She would strike him,” Mather, “with her fist and try to kick him”—probably meaning, try both to strike and kick him, for he adds, “her hand or foot would always recoil when within an inch or two of his body; thus giving the idea that there was an invisible coat of mail, of heavenly temper, and proof against the assaults of the devil around his sacred person.” That “idea” looks much more like a child born within the historian’s own mind than a gift to him by Mather. A statement by the latter that her hand or foot would always recoil when within an inch or two of his body, hardly justifies the slurring innuendo which seems to be appended to it. But ignorance of many operating laws, forces, and agents pertaining to the subject discussed by the modern historian, let him sometimes become as tempting a target for the shafts of ridicule as he found Mather to be. Without presuming that Mather perceived that natural laws generated repulsion between matter animated and moved by a disembodied spirit and matter in its normal conditions, we can state that extensive observation has generated the conclusion that unless there exists rapport with, or at least an absence of repulsion between, the sphere of the spirit using the borrowed hand or foot, and the sphere of the normal person aimed at, natural law forbids their contact. William Morse made such observation as caused him to say in his deposition that “the wedge and spade flying on his wife did not touch her.” Forceful and rapid approximations of hands and feet under control of invisibles, toward the bodies of surrounding witnesses, and marvelous arrestings of those moving limbs so that no contact ensues, are of very frequent occurrence. Very many parlor ornaments and household utensils, hard and soft, light and heavy, are, by spirits, not unfrequently set in rapid motion back and forth, and crosswise, promiscuously over and amid a crowd of people in a room, and yet but few persons are ever hit, and the few sensitives in rapport with the performers, and contributors to their apparatus, if hit, are never hurt. The temper of Mather’s shielding coat of mail was just as heavenly as that of each other human being’s coat which the Master Armorer in nature’s boundless shop forges and furnishes for the protection of each human child who is sent forth to fight the battles of life in gross flesh and bones. Not his own holiness, but either nature’s antipathies or spirit forbearance saved Mather from the blows, and the historian wronged him perhaps when he intimated that the divine thought otherwise; for that man, halting as his steps were, and small as his advance was, made nearer approach toward a fair comprehension and exposition of our witchcraft than any other American who wrote upon that subject, till since the publication of “History of Witchcraft.”
Many other pranks, not less marvelous than the ones already presented, are ascribed to this girl; but notice of them may be omitted here, because the general character of the operations around her are all that this work proposes to exhibit. We must, however, give the reader opportunity to peruse the historian’s concluding comments upon this case. He says,—