“A. They do no harm to me. I no hurt them at all.”
The first question by the magistrates implies the presence there of the afflicted children, and of their then seeming to be invisibly hurt. It also implies the magistrate’s assumption that Tituba was hurting them. Her denial that either they had harmed her or that she was hurting them was distinct. But the magistrate seemingly doubted its truth or its sufficiency, for he next asked,—
“Q. Why have you done it?
“A. I have done nothing. I can’t tell when the devil works.
“Q. What? Doth the devil tell you that he hurts them?
“A. No. He tells me nothing.”
She conceded here that the Devil might be, and probably was, at work upon the children; but his doings were beyond the reach of her perceptive faculties. He made no communication to her. Thus early her words indicate that her knowledge of spiritual matters caused her to draw and adhere to a distinction between The Devil and either a Spirit, or bands of spirits, which distinction she and other mediumistic ones of her times adhered to, while the public lacked knowledge that facts required it, and ignorantly called all visitants from spirit realms The Devil.
When glancing at Cotton Mather’s unpublished account of Mercy Short, we copied from it the following statement: “As the bewitched in other parts of the world have commonly had no other style for their tormentors but only They and Them, so had Mercy Short.” Clairvoyants and all who obtained knowledge of spirits through perceptions by their own interior organs seldom, if ever, have seriously spoken of either seeing, hearing, or feeling the Devil. Possibly, at times, some may have done so by way of accommodation to the unillumined world’s modes of speech. But, as Mather says, they have, the world over, generally called the personages perceived, “They” and “Them.” Such a fact demands regard. The personal observers of spiritual beings have never been accustomed to designate them by bad names. Fair inference from this is, that such beings have not generally worn forbidding aspects. It has been the reporters, and not the utterers, of descriptive accounts of spiritual beings who have made use of the terms “devil,” “satan,” and the like. Mather perceived the common “style” of the bewitched, and yet the warping habit of Christendom made him preserve continuance of inaccurate reporting; for he, like most others in his day, persistently wrote “devil,” where that name was not announced, and ought not to have been foisted in. Tituba saw no one whom she ever called The Devil, though history has taught that she did.
“Q. Do you never see something appear in some shape? A. No. Never see anything.”
This answer is not true if construed literally in connection with its question. She did, as will soon appear, sometimes see many things clairvoyantly, but never The Devil, who had just before been mentioned.