Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism

What It's About

Putnam re-examines the historical record of witchcraft in colonial New England, focusing above all on the Salem trials of 1692. He argues that earlier historians had unfairly dismissed the whole episode as the product of fraud, hysteria, or malice, and sets out to show instead that many of the phenomena reported — the fits and visions of the afflicted, and the powers attributed to the accused — were genuine manifestations of mediumship, misread by a Puritan society with no framework beyond demonic possession to explain them. Working chapter by chapter, he weighs the conflicting contemporary accounts of Cotton Mather and Robert Calef, and revisits the cases of Tituba, Sarah Good, Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Susanna Martin, and others caught up in the panic, before closing with his own view of the psychological forces and motives behind it.

Key Concepts

Central to Putnam's case is the spiritualist idea that certain individuals have a heightened mediumistic sensitivity, and that this — rather than deception or literal compact with the Devil — better explains the strange behaviour recorded at Salem and in earlier cases such as those of Ann Cole and Elizabeth Knap. He separates out the roles played by the "confessors," the "accusing girls," and the prosecutors, treating each group's motives in turn, and repeatedly draws parallels to contemporary 19th-century séance practice, treating the events of the 1690s as an early and badly misunderstood encounter with forces he believed spiritualist mediums were now exploring more safely.

About the Author

Allen Putnam (1802–1887) was a Massachusetts writer who worked as a merchant and as an editor of the New England Farmer before becoming a committed spiritualist, going on to become one of the movement's most prolific 19th-century authors and applying its ideas to historical and religious subjects.