Thus far questions pertaining to the character of the main motives operating in the authors of acts called witchcraft, have purposely been avoided. The actors and their doings have been sought for, irrespective of morality. But the cui bono, the what good? must have been asked over and over again by the reader. Why did any intelligent being, whether mortal or spirit, thus woefully invade and disturb the homes of able, honored, worthy Christian men? and especially why perpetrate such agonizing cruelties upon bright, lovely, and promising children?The spirit-world, as well as ours, holds inhabitants differing widely one from another in character, tastes, propensities, and occupations—it contains yearners to recommune with surviving kindred at the old material home—contains its rovers, its explorers, its scientists, its seekers after novelties, facts, and principles; after new places, scenes, and peoples to visit; after new routes and appliances for travel, and after new applications of known powers and forces. The motives for acting upon and through mortal forms may vary from worst to best, from best to worst.

The moral character of motives can neither invalidate nor confirm what has been adduced. The motives, having been either good or bad, may be ascribed to spirits as well as mortals, and to mortals as well as spirits, for both good and bad beings dwell in mortal forms now, and both classes have left their outer forms behind, and passed into the abiding-place of spirits—have become spirits, and that, too, without necessary alteration of their moral states. Motives in different cases and with different operators were doubtless quite varied. Correct presentation of their qualities in connection with the several cases adduced in the preceding pages is obviously beyond our power. Though conscious that we must probably be mistaken in some instances, we yet are willing to state some of the thoughts which facts and appearances have suggested.

Perhaps no unseen intelligences aided or acted through either Margaret Jones or Ann Hibbins; and, if any did, their performances in and of themselves were never perceptibly harmful to the public. We apprehend, however, that if the whole truth were known, man would now see that kind physicians, who had bid farewell to earth, continued to practice the healing art through the brain and hands of Margaret Jones.

The users of Ann Cole’s vocal organs furnished no distinct indication that they were either specially benevolent or the reverse. We are constrained to regard them as having been low, ignorant, willing to excite consternation among men, and very willing to help the lewd Greensmiths on, by the halter’s use, to speedy entrance into conditions in which themselves could confer with these debased ones more familiarly than was possible while they remained encased in flesh. Such a view need not imply that they were malicious. Desire to hold closer connection with one’s affinities is natural, and not necessarily bad. Communicators from the other side of death’s portals generally decline to call any spirits bad; they speak of many as being low, ignorant, benighted, undeveloped, &c., but seldom call any one bad. They seem to regard many much as we do green fruits. One omits to call the half-grown apple bad, however sour or crabbed, and says only that it is immature, unripe, &c., implying that, though in its present condition not good to eat, time may come when it will be palatable and nutritious.

Elizabeth Knap’s visitant—the one to whom she said, “What cheer, old man?”—who presumably was the chief operator through and upon her form, and lingered about her for at least three years, we regard as a sort of recluse spirit, who kept mainly aloof from other disembodied ones, and found his chief enjoyment in retaining or resuming as close alliances as possible with the outer or material world, and from a selfish desire to secure permanent possession of this instrument, strove through torturings to reduce her to subjection; and this, perhaps, without desire to injure her, but mainly with a view to gratify his own selfishness. The other one—the pretty black boy—of a more lively disposition, found pleasure in playfully bantering the grave clergyman, and probably strove, in playful mood, to teach the honest and good man some lessons in charity and demonology. We see no reason why he may not be regarded as a genial good fellow, desiring to make some gloomy portion of mankind more cheerful and happy.

At Newbury there possibly was nothing more than a playful and self-gratifying exercise of constitutional powers by a band of spirit gymnasts—not malicious, but playful and rude; curious also, it may be, to see how far they might be able to frighten mortals and arouse consternating wonder, while they should be pleasurably exercising their own faculties. We view them as neither specially good or bad, but as heedless and rude in their frolic.

Appearances are different when we look at the Goodwin family. There an embodied old wild Irish woman’s spirit was the first to put forth psychologizing power over the children. She was moved by anger, or resentment, or both; her guardian or kindred spirits no doubt helped her, and from motives like her own. Perhaps we may properly call both her and her aids bad. Yet we hear no call to apply that word emphatically. Little Martha had just charged the old woman’s daughter with having stolen some of the clothes which the latter was employed to wash; and, if that charge was false, or even presumed by the old woman to be false, she, who was obviously fiery and ignorant, may not have been excessively diabolical in using any process of mental or emotional retaliation which was at her command. Perhaps ignorance and instinctive retaliation were quite as operative in her as malice.

Martha’s form, subsequently, when she was residing with Cotton Mather, was often used by one or more spirits who seem to have been bent upon showing the learned man that sport might exist and be enjoyable beyond the confines of mortal life, and that denizens there were disposed to make some at his expense. They soon showed him that linguists unseen could comprehend his meaning, whatever the language he might use for expression of his thought; and also thumped the sectarian by disdaining to read books which he approved, and by reading with ecstatic delight such as he condemned. Nor was this all; they exhibited in his presence feats of strength and agility, and many marvelous antics, which were suited to cause a thinker and scholar to hold on to his belief that others than the guileless miss took part in the performance of such marvels. While amusing themselves, they were exhibiters of instructive facts. Nothing bad in their purposes becomes apparent.

The case of most special interest and chief importance pertains to Salem. Upham, vol. ii. p. 429, says, “If there was anything supernatural in the witchcraft of 1692, if any other than human spirits were concerned at all, one thing is beyond a doubt; they were shockingly wicked spirits.” Beyond a doubt? Perhaps not in some minds. But if any disembodied spirits whatsoever, even shockingly wicked ones, were mainly performers of the convulsing operations at Salem, the historian’s theory of explanation is not only baseless, but is lamentably cruel and unjust toward the human instruments through whom the spirits acted. If specific doings prove their authors, if spirits, to have been shockingly wicked, the same having mortal authors, would prove the latter to have been just as shockingly wicked. We do not like to apply that defamatory phrase to all those girls and women who are set forth as the chief accusers. Were all those youthful females shockingly wicked? We hope not, and think not. God rules alike in the invisible and visible world, and often moves in mysterious ways for executing benevolent designs.

The motive of Tituba’s “tall man with white hair,” whom we regard as prime mover in the most momentous witchcraft scene the world has ever witnessed, is difficult to comprehend satisfactorily. The deliberateness indicated both by his visit to Tituba five days in advance of practical operation, and by his then appointing a special time and place for entering upon his intended processes, bespeaks a definite and abiding motive of some marked quality. Judging from the earlier and more perceptible effects of his doings, the world must almost necessarily regard him as a deliberate tormentor of innocent children; as a disturber of domestic, social, religious, and civil peace; as an immolator of the innocent and the virtuous; as hell’s sovereign acting out his fiendish pleasure upon the inmates of a Christian fold. Infernal malignity, at the first glance, seems to have actuated this intruder at the parsonage. World-wide experience, however, has learned that many things are “not as they seem.” We have been taught to recognize One being, and there may be many others in spheres unseen, in whose sight “a thousand years are as one day.” Teachings of history and observation show that the overruling power is attended and guided by far—very far—reaching prescience; and also that many of man’s greatest blessings are educed from temporal evils of vast magnitude. The malice of man nailed Jesus to the cross. What wears every appearance of wicked motive is often used as helpful, if not needed, instrumentality in procuring man’s deliverance and redemption from debasement and oppression.

When John Brown made his raid across the border line of freedom, not only the invaded South, but a large portion of the North regarded him as a ruthless and malicious invader of the rights of our fellow-countrymen, and therefore worthy of a felon’s doom. A cannon soon sent to Fort Sumter the comments of the South upon what Brown had done, and war, carnage, and horrors of varied forms and vast dimensions soon spread over the broad nation, from the St. John to the southern gulf, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. John Brown was no felon, no malicious invader, but a philanthropic planner to strip the chains of slavery from four millions of his brother men; and his step, though a seeming evil then, led directly on to the emancipation of all for whose good he went forth in seeming malice.

When plagues of various kinds were invoked and brought upon the Egyptians by and through the mediumistic Moses and Aaron, what Egyptian would have deemed that the motives of the unseen intelligence who counseled and controlled them could be benevolent? Plague, pestilences, and sore afflictions for a long time, and finally death of the first born, were imposed upon each Egyptian household. The motive to those inflictions is deemed to have been deliverance of the children of Israel from bondage. Egyptians being judges, it must have been a shockingly wicked spirit who acted upon them through Moses and Aaron.

History, on most of its pages, shows that war—war,—that ruthless trampler upon the innocent scarcely less than upon the offending, has ever been a very common, if not the chief, instrument by which oppressed people have gained deliverance, and through use of which the depressed have come up to higher stand-points. If our world has, through all its past ages, been wisely and beneficently managed by some intelligence higher than man, then far-reaching wisdom—supernal wisdom—has often seen that the good of the many—nay, the good of all—required the coming of suffering, sacrifice, and anguish upon the few. Has the Great Permitter of the many sufferings which war has engendered been “shockingly wicked”?

The chains of old enslaving errors often become invisible and unfelt by those on whom they were early placed by a mother’s kindly hand, and the like to which all associates wear as supposed helps, and never as suspected hindrances, to expansion and health of mind and heart. Nothing short of a most strenuous conflict—nothing short of a struggle for life and all that makes life valuable and dear—is competent in some cases to awaken perception that such chains are and ever have been cramping their wearers, and holding them back from such expansion and freedom as their Maker fitted men to attain to and enjoy. We regard the witchcraft creed as having been such a chain.

Looking carefully at the methods by which the power that overrules all terrestrial affairs has almost invariably led man to break away from thralldom and oppression, can one reasonably entertain belief that any purely peaceful measures, any preachings, arguments, appeals to the reason of men, could have brought Christendom, at any time after the twelfth or thirteenth century, to perceive that its witchcraft creed was enslaving its mind, and thwarting its proper expansion heavenward? We apprehend not; and also we surmise that in 1602 supernal intelligence saw that opportunity and power existed, which, if then availed of, could put mortals into a conflict which would reveal to them the inherent falsity and barbarity of the witchcraft creed, and thus let such light into their minds as, in time, would lead them to cast off the chains in which they were bound, attain to clearer and more accurate views of their relations to God and the spirit-world, and rise to higher and freer manhood.

If such were the case, we can readily conceive that supernal wisdom and benevolence might permit and foster the oncoming of an appalling and terrific struggle which should bring into vigorous action man’s every latent energy, sweep away in its course many erroneous beliefs, hampering customs, and ruts of thought, and thoroughly overturn much which had long been deemed immovable truth. Such a course might be the most beneficent possible, even though it involved destruction of the comfort, peace, and lives of many innocent and most estimable inhabitants at the place and vicinity where the battle should be waged, and that, too, whether the war itself should be the ostensible offspring of revenge and malice, or a brave conflict for preservation of one’s altars and fireside in peace.

Some amusement, and little else perhaps, may be furnished by presentation of what a spiritualist’s fancy, prior to careful study of facts narrated by Tituba, had become accustomed to deem not only possible, but probable. She was a slave dwelling among oppressors of her kindred and race—oppressors of the negro, the Indian, and of those generally who were “guilty of a skin not colored like their own,” and of worshiping gods different from their own. What more natural than that departed ones, whom the whites had defrauded, injured, and oppressed while dwellers here, and whose surviving kindred were still being treated in like manner, should embrace an opportunity which the mediumistic qualities and the abode of Tituba furnished, for perpetrating retaliation whence woes had been received? True Christian morality may denounce such action as being “shockingly wicked,” but the more prevalent morality in the world—in the more resolute portions of it at least, and especially in the less enlightened—may be as ready to commend as to condemn it, and to applaud as to censure those whose fire and pluck induced and enabled them to pay over upon their oppressors wrong for wrong, even augmented with interest at the highest rates which their altered circumstances allowed. It having been discovered that Tituba’s form was a portal for spirit return, fancy saw the spirits of her ancestral race, and hosts of ascended aborigines of Massachusetts soil, eagerly coming back through her helping properties, disposed and eager to cast their impalpable arrows and tomahawks at any members of the wronging race who might be vulnerable by such weapons. Scouts swiftly and widely spread over the spirit hunting-grounds knowledge of the glorious opportunity for retaliation and revenge which had come, and hosts of volunteers rushed thence with lightning speed to the alluring scene. Quick havoc ensued, and the great consternation, bewilderment, devastation, slaughter, disturbance of peace, and agonizings of terror and awe, which the invasion produced, gave keenest pleasure, satisfaction, and joy to the assailants. Possibly Indian spirits might then begin to cherish hopes of expelling all whites from the land of their fathers, and of re-acquiring and leaving the whole a legacy to red men’s heirs.

But the whites, not less than the darker-skinned, were under the supervision of spirit guardians, friends, and helpers, who, though probably taken by surprise and at disadvantage, were by no means disposed to leave their wards, kindred, and loved ones to be long thus harassed and abused. Invisible hosts soon mustered, and warred against other invisible hosts over and around the Village; and when the struggle had been waged far enough to sever witchcraft’s chains, the laws of the Highest permitted the guardians of the Christians to conquer a lasting peace whose balm would heal the wounds inflicted, and whose fruits would be emancipation from cramping errors, and consequent expansion and elevation of mental powers.

As, perhaps, appropriate sequent to our fanciful views, we next present something which was not born in our own brain, and which may or may not be statement of ancient facts. We have devoted but little time to directly seeking information from spirits relating to the subject upon which we are writing, and yet have seldom entered into conversation with any good clairvoyant, at any time during the last year or two, without receiving description of one or more spirits then in attendance, and manifesting desire to have us recognize them. In most cases they have shown their names. In this manner Cotton Mather, more than any other one, signifies that interest in our present work draws him near to us. Mather’s mother, also Martha Goodwin, Rebecca Nurse, and others, have presented their cards through persons ignorant that individuals bearing such names ever lived. But Mather has done more. On two or three occasions, using a medium’s organs of speech, he has entered into conversation with us upon his connection with witchcraft. He is not now well pleased with his blindness when in his physical form, and urges us to be more severe in our criticisms upon his course than historic facts permit us to be.

February 9, 1875, he was in control of a medium, and we inquired as to his present views of George Burroughs. At once and cordially he described Burroughs as one of the brightest of all spirits whom he had seen, and as “illumining whatever sphere he enters.” We asked Mather if he had ever learned who the spirit was that came to Tituba and started Salem witchcraft. He had not. Had he met Tituba? “Yes.” “Can you not,” we asked, “find him through her?” “Probably,” was his response; “and will try, if you wish it.” “Well, then,” we said, “two weeks from this day and hour we will meet you at this place.” This was arranged through an unconscious medium, who never receives into her consciousness any knowledge of what her lips utter while she is entranced, and she was on that occasion. We did not inform her, nor did any other mortal than ourself know, that we arranged for a subsequent meeting with Mather.

We called upon the medium February 23, when forthwith, in her normal and conscious state, she said that she was then seeing at our side two spirits of very strange aspect, and of race or races unknown to her. One of them she described as a male, uncouth in aspect, having large piercing eyes, a very wild look, and as being clothed in a sort of blouse, beneath and below which were short pants tucked into the shoes; also his teeth were very large. The other was a female of unknown race, and of a race different from that to which the male belonged; her complexion was dark, but she was neither negro nor Indian, and exhibited the letter T.This medium may have known, and probably did, that we were engaged in writing upon witchcraft; but she is not conversant with its history, nor did she know the names of individuals concerned in it, nor the parts any had severally performed.

Very shortly after having given the above description, the medium was entranced; soon Cotton Mather, speaking through her, signified that he had brought with him both Tituba and her nocturnal visitant when she was slave of Mr. Parris; also, he stated, that, since they were not accustomed to giving utterance through borrowed lips, he proposed to speak for and of them. The statement relating to the man was substantially as follows:—

“His name was Zachahara; he was of Egyptian descent, but a Ninevite, or dweller in Nineveh. His time on earth was somewhat before that of Moses. Not long after his death, he, a spirit, observed that a spirit by the name of Jehocah—not Jehovah—was working strange marvels, and enacting cruelties among the race from which himself had sprung, through one Moses, and was thereby acting out a spirit’s purposes toward man through a mortal’s form. At once he, Zachahara, felt strong inclination and desire to exercise his own powers in the same mode. The desire clung to him tenaciously, and ever kept him alert, to find a mortal whom he could use with efficiency rivaling that which Jehocah manifested through Moses. No one of his many trials, however, was very successful until he put forth his skill and power upon and through Tituba. His ruling motive was desire to ascertain how far he, being a spirit, could get and keep control of a mortal form, and what amount and kinds of wonders he could perform with such an instrument. The motive was devoid of either malice or benevolence; it essentially was that of the scientist seeking new knowledge of nature’s permissions. To keep Tituba in good humor with himself, he freely made promises to bestow upon her many fine things; and, to please her, he would say and do anything he thought might add to his power over her, and, through her, over other mortals.”

Such was the account; and, while it was coming upon our ears, it carried us back to familiar accounts of marvels of old, and we felt that the acts of Jehocah through Moses, and those of Zachahara through Tituba, bespoke motives so much alike in apparent barbarity, that, if either actor was blameworthy, it might be difficult to see why equal blame should not be meted out upon the other.Mather, speaking of and for Tituba, said, that “when the man first came to her and sought her service and aid, he was very bright and pleasant; but that, when she declined to comply with his wishes and demands, he became awfully dark and terrible.” Briefly, Tituba herself managed the medium’s vocal organs, furnished a simpering confirmation of Mather’s statement, and said, with a shrug and shiver, “he was awful! awful!”

Subsequent conversation at the same seance elicited from spirits their belief, that, as soon as a door of access to men through Tituba was discovered, numerous Indian spirits were able and eager to rush through and lend a helping hand to the old Ninevite, and were devoid of any strong desire to help gently; indeed, they were very willing to molest the whites on their own responsibility. Soon, when unimpassioned search for knowledge of what ability spirits possessed or might acquire to revisit and again act amid terrestrial scenes was too much attended by agents willing to enact, and actually enacting, havoc too severe to be longer tolerated, wise and compassionate spirits brought power to bear which soon put a stop to what was producing most agonizing consequences. Spirits claim that they did much in the way of changing the views of mortals, and preventing a renewal of prosecutions at the next term of court. Perceiving that enough cruelty had been enacted to make mortals ready to ask whether both humanity and God were not belied by the creed Christians were enforcing, they turned the minds of men to more rational and humane views.

Some time during the winter of 1874-5, Rev. G. Burroughs having poured out, through a medium’s lips, a few sentences redolent with charity and heavenly grace, we asked him what he now deemed the motive which primarily induced some spirit to inaugurate the operations which brought himself and many others to untimely end? His response was, “I suppose it was the natural and proper desire of some spirit to resume communion with its dear ones on earth.” No spirit has ever indicated to us a suspicion even that the spirits whose acts evolved witchcraft were either malevolent, censurable, or in any sense shockingly wicked.

Did supernal prescience select and post agents peculiarly fitted to perform the witchcraft tragedy? Perhaps so: and possibly Sir William Phips was not governor by mere chance. Some statements by Calef indicate that Sir William when young, perhaps while but a learner of ship-carpentry in Maine, received a written communication which led him to go to Europe and obtain means whereby to seek for a wreck, the finding of which brought him fortune and title. He long and carefully preserved the prophetic paper, and, when flush in means, paid the writer of it more than two hundred pounds. From the same or a similar source he fore-learned his becoming a commander, governor of New England, and other events of his life. Information of that kind usually comes to such as are mediumistic enough to be susceptible of guidance, or at least of swayings, by the intelligence from whom the prophecy issues. Sir Phips may have been himself mediumistic. The probable fact that the accusing girls named the governor’s wife as one from whom they received annoyance bespeaks probability that she too had place in the class of impressibles. Therefore, one inclined to prosecute such speculations is here furnished with a basis on which to argue that the Infinite Prescience which permitted the advent of Salem witchcraft, also embraced fit instruments in fit position for controlling its course, and also for putting a stop to it as soon as it should have outwrought enough of seeming evil to beget the good which Infinite Benevolence purposed to bestow upon mortals. Spirits take to themselves much credit for the part they performed in changing the opinions and course of the authorities and people here in the autumn of 1692, and the early months of the following year.

The adjournment of the court, and no law permitting another session for months, gave opportunity for reflection. Also the actual and contemplated arrests of many of high standing and most estimable character were matters of sobering influence, so that reason resumed its sway; no more were tried for witchcraft, and all prisoners were set free. This may have occurred either with or without special action of spirits upon the public mind.

We now regard the primal motive as nearly or quite devoid of moral quality. It probably was either a natural and proper desire to get access to dear ones left on earth, or some experimental or some scientific impulse to test the power which a spirit could exercise over those encased in mortal forms. When, before the days of ether, good Dr. Flag had fixed his forceps firmly on our raging tooth, and given a long, strong pull till out of breath, our pains, our agony, our heavy blows upon his hand and arms, failed to make him let go. He was shockingly wicked at that moment, for he not only held on and kept us in torture, but pulled again without success; and even then he would not let go, but pulled yet once more, and the tooth came out. Spirits, getting access to mortals, may have judged that only through transient evils and sufferings could man get relief from severe chronic maladies, and that, when opportunity occurred, their kindest possible treatment of men was homoeopathic—was the curing like with like—curing evil by inflicting evil. They may have been so shockingly wicked as to do that.

Spirits may often, and generally explore and operate from motives not perceptibly different from such as actuate their human counterparts. The devoted vivisectionist seldom shrinks from entering upon, or gives up pursuit of, knowledge because the scalpel agonizes his living subject. So, too, a spirit in pursuit of knowledge—if, either casually or by intended experiment, finding himself controlling the will and organs of Tituba or some other impressible mortal, and thus opening up a new field for exploration—might be strongly inclined to see how far and efficiently he could wield forces of nature so as himself to sway the forms and affairs of embodied men. Each gain in power or skill for acting amid terrestrial beings, scenes, and objects, would naturally thrill him with pleasure, and incite him to follow up researches in the spirit of science. That spirit is prone to look upon sufferings which its own processes occasion, as but temporary incidents, and of little account in comparison with the beneficent results which its triumphs will procure. Extension of their own fields of knowledge and influence was perhaps among the chief motives which prompted spirits to perform the wonders that startled, frenzied, and agonized the subjects and observers of their operations in 1692. Another may have been self-gratification by revisiting well-known scenes; and yet another, beneficence to man by opening for his use a new source of knowledge and wisdom.

Realms unseen are the abodes of sympathetic as well as of scientific beings; and as soon as a false creed had been forced to disclose its falsity, the former may have seen occasion to dissuade the latter from acting further upon benighted dwellers in mortal forms, until time should bring man to calm reflection and retrospection, and to possession of such mental freedom as would embolden him to meet unawed, strange visitants from unseen realms, and extend to even such a friendly hand. The lapse of a hundred and fifty years brought such mental freedom to us, purchased by the sufferings of our fathers, that, undeterred by fears of the halter, we now can invite to our earthly homes the loved and saintly ones who have passed on to realms above, hold blissful and uplifting communings with them, and learn their justification of the wonderful ways of God both to and through the children of men and in all nature.

Whatever the ruling motive of the chief direct producer of Salem Witchcraft may have been, the resistless power which moves all things, including malignant motives, onward toward the production of ultimate good, caused the fierce conflict we are considering to soon put an effectual stop to prosecutions for witchcraft throughout all Christian lands, and shattered to fragments a pernicious creed which had long enslaved the Christian mind. Costly as that struggle was in pains, sicknesses, tortures, anguish, physical exhaustions, domestic distresses, social alienations, church discords, languishments in prison, fears, frenzies, and even life, the price may not have been high for the wide-spread and abiding blessings of mental freedom which it obtained.