Perhaps only few persons who give credence to the substantial accuracy of the transmitted statements of witchcraft facts, will dissent from Hutchinson’s obvious meaning when he said that “some of them seem to be more than natural;” that is, as we suppose him to have meant, they seem to have required for their production something beyond the recognized powers of embodied human beings. He, however, in spite of such seeming, sought to lead other minds to fancy that fraud and malice acting upon credulity—in other words, that cunning and malicious embodied human beings, and none other—were concerned in their manifestation. Upham and Drake have not only followed Hutchinson’s lead in excluding invisible agents, but have omitted to admit that some of the facts seem to be more than natural. They blindly fancy that they find resident in human minds and hearts of seeming brilliancy and goodness, capabilities of artfulness, malice, and might which wrest from Satan’s brow all laurels which the world has meeded to him for his imputed prowess on witchcraft’s battlefields. As one of the human race, we protest against such slander of our kindred humans while embodied, none of whom, while dwellers here below, were ever smelted in fires hot enough to elicit from their own interiors some forces which were put in action through their forms—forces which, in common parlance, though not in absolute fact, were “more than natural.” Events fearfully mysterious have long been, and now often are, spoken of as the productions of beings, or at least of One Special being, lurking somewhere away off beyond the outmost limits of nature. But each and every hiding-place of even Old Nick is somewhere within those limits, and even he can never and nowhere act otherwise than in obedience to nature’s laws. How far up, down, around, do natural forces and agents extend and operate? If there be a fixed limit to nature’s domain, where is it? When life departs from man’s body, are the forces which continue to act upon his invisible spirit, whether that continues to be or ceases to be a conscious individuality,—are the forces which then act upon it and which bear it to its appropriate position in spirit spheres, natural forces, or are they other?
When man escapes from his gross and sluggish encasement, and becomes—as the reappearance of many of the race teaches that he does—a freed spirit, he does not escape from within the realm of nature, nor pass to where natural substances and forces cease to sustain and act upon him. The word “supernatural” as well as its equivalent phrase, “more than natural,” is often misleading; it tends to generate supposition that nature terminates where man’s external senses cease to take cognizance. Absolutely, however, as we believe, all beings, including even God, and all things whatsoever, are parts of nature; so that the word “supernatural” can scarcely find place for rigid, unqualified application. No objection to its usual application is here intended, provided it is not used to convey the idea that things to which it is applied are the work of intelligence above and beyond the control and restrictions of universal laws or forces; provided it does not intimate that the works are what theology has called miracles, i. e., acts “contrary to the established course of things.” Such works probably never did and never can occur. Higher and unrecognized laws are availed of whenever known laws are thwarted in their results, as when the magnet takes the steel upward in spite of gravitation: gravitation works on with as much steadiness and force as over, while the magnet overpoweringly pulls against it. The overbalancing magnetic force does not act “contrary to the established course of things,” but simply performs its own functions in full harmony with that course; so of all mysterious events in the vast universe. All move on in obedience to law; all events are outworkings of universal forces, none of which are ever broken or suspended, though sometimes some of them are restrained by other and counteracting forces from manifesting their usual results.
All the marvelous works of both ancient and modern Spiritualism may have occurred, and yet none of them have been, in fact, “more than natural,” however much so some minds may be accustomed to deem them. Take psychic forces as natural instrumentalities, take both embodied and disembodied intelligences who had skill and power for the control of such forces, and with these take also others who had special susceptibilities for yielding to psychic action, and you will then have in your conceptions ample natural means for the production of each and every marvel that was ever described in human history, and all such may have been produced without any more help or hindrance in kind from either God or the devil, than we all receive in the ordinary acts of daily life. Bring in what is meant by either magnetism, or mesmerism, or psychology, or psychism, or by any other term expressive of that action upon and within a human being, which lets either his own spirit-senses or the forces of some outside intelligence get play therein independent of and superior to the owner’s outer or physical senses, and we then may have fitting and adequate instrumentality through which finite intelligence can legitimately produce all the marvels that human eyes have ever witnessed. Professor Cromwell F. Varley, one of England’s most eminent electricians, said, when addressing a committee of the London Dialectical Society, “I believe the mesmeric trance and the spiritual trance are produced by similar means, and I believe the mesmeric and the spiritual forces are the same. They are both the action of a spirit, and the difference between the spiritual trance and the mesmeric trance I believe is this: in the mesmeric trance, the will that overpowers or entrances the patient is in a human body; in the spiritual trance, that will which overpowers the patient is not in a human body.”
The position taken by Mr. Varley, whose observations were made mostly within his own domestic circle, and whose professional pursuits led him to be a constant and careful observer of the nature, properties, and actions of delicate forces, is worthy of much regard. His view is probably in harmony with the conclusion of most minds which have studied carefully the outworkings of mesmerism and Spiritualism. The two isms, in some views of them, are essentially one in nature, the latter being the butterfly or moth that came from out the former. The grub and its moth are the same being in different stages of development. Multitudes of human beings raised, and to be raised, from lower to higher development have their habitats along the line where the material and spiritual interblend, and some are measurably amphibious there—can move and act in either of two auras. The younger, or less advanced, flesh-clad mesmerists, prevailingly abide in the material, while spirits have their most congenial residence generally beyond where the palpably material extends; but either class can at times bring under their control the physical systems of many human beings.
By means of this psychism, or this outworking of soul power, there may be kept up reciprocal action or intercommunion between what are usually called the material and spiritual worlds, both of which absolutely are natural, and are pervaded by interacting natural forces which are at the service of peculiarly endowed, or constituted, or unfolded persons, who are, or may become, competent and disposed to use them. A disembodied spirit no more needs special permission or aid from Omnipotence for acting upon men and matter, than the diver needs such for deep descents beneath the water’s surface. Natural permission for spirits to reincase themselves in, or to act upon, palpable matter, is as free and full as man’s is to put on submarine armor.
This much we have said for the purpose of disclosing our stand-points of observations and reasonings pertaining to Salem witchcraft, and now come to more direct consideration of that special topic.
At Salem Village about a dozen people, mostly the girls previously named, were strangely and grievously tormented, at short intervals, during several months. They often endured contortions, convulsions, and very acute sufferings. At times many of them became deaf, dumb, blind, &c. Seemingly to beholders they personally performed most strange and incredible feats of strength and simulations, and made astounding utterances. Because of these doings and sufferings they were, after some weeks of observation, deemed to be “under an evil hand”—were pronounced bewitched, and were termed, in the parlance of that day, “the afflicted.”
According to the faith of those times, no person could be bewitched in any other way than through some other embodied person who had entered into a covenant with the Devil, and voluntarily become his instrument or his agent. It was then assumed, also, that the afflicted ones could perceive who the person or persons were through whom the devil tormented them. Consequently the sufferers were teased, coaxed, or driven to name some one or more who was causing their sufferings. Those named by the sufferers as producers of their maladies were called the accused, or were said to be “cried out upon.”
Belief in the ability of the afflicted to designate accurately their afflicters, was then prevalent; but though probably born of facts in human experience, and in itself fundamentally correct, it was indiscreetly and harmfully applied. The mediumistic or psychologized condition often renders its subjects practically independent of time, space, and gross matter, and makes them possessors of ability to feel, or rather to sense, contact with the properties of some peculiarly constituted mortals, even though such persons at the time be physically many miles away. The persons from whom such agitating emanations would proceed would generally themselves be highly mediumistic.
If the inner or spiritual perceptive organs of Mr. Parris, Dr. Griggs, Thomas Putnam, and their consulting associates, of whom we shall speak hereafter, were inextricably interblended with their outer bodies, so that they were, par excellence, non-mediumistic, their presence near the bodies of persons infilled with abnormal properties by spirits might be imperceptible by the entranced, while either the poor, “melancholy, distracted” (?) Sarah Good, or “bed-rid” Mrs. Osburn (who will come into notice on a future page), if highly mediumistic, might, though being then in their distant homes bodily, be present as spirits, and their emanations might be distinctly felt by the suffering girls, and be by them visibly traced to their sources. Mediumistic states or entrancements, however induced, often bring their subjects into rapport with other mediumistic persons afar off, while they as often shut off sensibility to the presence of the physically imprisoned or very slightly impressible ones who are near by. The saying that “birds of a feather flock together” apparently has more constant application outside of gravitation’s dominating reach than within it—more among relatively freed spirits than among rigidly body-hampered ones.