Let’s Hear It for Witches!

Do witches exist? Quite a few people think so. I know a Long Island family that spends every Hallowe’en (or Samhain) in Salem, Massachusetts. I was recently astounded to discover that people can and do buy spells on Etsy. I ask you: Is a $7 spell as good as a $50 spell?

Let’s be rational here: Don’t you think that, if witches existed, there would be no war, no illness, no poverty, no death?

A book by the British author Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, posits an England in which wizards, warlocks, etc., can influence history and are hired to do just that. In this book, the footnotes (all fictional) are as good as the text.

Of course, there are also poseurs—people who hold themselves out as wizards but are just full of it. This book has the approximate heft of a doorstop, but you should run out and grab it anyway.

A while back, they accused “Goody” Garlick of doing something really bad in East Hampton. I think the jurors ruled her innocent. Some say, “Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live.”

Quite a few of those charged as witches were people versed in “folk religion” or unproven herbal cures. I wouldn’t be surprised if some healers threw in a few incantations as well, just to make things more convincing.

When I was putting together a paper on colonial writing, I found what purported to be the Salem Witch Trial transcript in the Cooper Union library. The accusers, teenage daughters of a prominent family, named certain neighbors.

These were people with whom their father had problems: for example, one household refused to sell or donate their property to him. The charges got stranger and stranger: One witch flew through the air inside a walnut shell, etc.

Things came to a screeching halt only when the girls accused the wife of the governor, but not before 25 people died.

Take three teaspoons of burdock and call me in the morning.—Kathryn Nocerino