Blog Archives
New Interview with Bobbie Ashley on WIKK 103.5
In this latest interview with Bobbie Ashley, I talk about my new book, Witchcraft in Illinois, on WIKK 103.5 The Eagle in Newton, Illinois.
Witchcraft in Illinois, 1818-1885
The following is an excerpt from my new book Witchcraft in Illinois: A Cultural History. Early historians claimed witch beliefs vanished from Illinois along with its earliest pioneers, but in this chapter I discuss incidents involving witchcraft that occurred even after the Civil War. Order it today on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com
The end of the Revolutionary War opened the vast Northwest Territory to settlement, and Scotch-Irish pioneers began to cross the Appalachian Mountains and travel down the Ohio River looking for new land. Many settled in the bottomlands between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, in what would become southern Illinois.
Following close behind, Yankees from New England spread out across northern Illinois and down the Illinois River Valley. Rapid growth transformed the state from a sparsely populated wilderness to a thriving agricultural region. Between 1800 and 1840, Illinois’ population grew from 2,458 to 476,183 residents.
Southern Illinois was called “Egypt” or “Little Egypt” for its proximity to a vital river trade route (like the Nile delta in Egypt) and the presence of towns with names like Cairo, Thebes, Dongola, and Karnak. New Englanders who immigrated to Illinois in the early half of the nineteenth century also called it “Dark Egypt.” They viewed the Scotch-Irish pioneers who preceded them as uneducated, boorish, and backwards.
For their part, the Scotch-Irish, who emigrated from Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas, viewed these Yankees, in the colorful words of one historian, as “a skinning, tricky, penurious race of peddlers, filling the country with tinware, brass clocks, and wooden nutmegs.”
According to cultural historian David Hackett Fischer, Scotch-Irish pioneers were obsessed with magic and sorcery, and they brought those beliefs with them into Illinois. One early account of witchcraft in Little Egypt comes from the History of Williamson County Illinois (1876). “From 1818 to 1835,” its author claimed, “there were a great many witches in this county.” On a place called Davis’ Prairie (also known as David’s Prairie), there lived a woman named Eva Locker, who was widely reputed to be a witch.
Witchcraft in the Illinois Country
The following is an excerpt from my new book Witchcraft in Illinois: A Cultural History. Using a variety of sources, I reveal the truth behind the fate of two French slaves, allegedly executed for witchcraft in Cahokia in 1779. Order it today on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com
Philip Francois Renault purchased several hundred African slaves in Santo Domingo, a Spanish city on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean (and the modern-day capital of the Dominican Republic). In 1720, he brought the slaves to Fort de Chartres in what is now Monroe County, Illinois, intending to use them in a silver mining operation… The French census of 1726 showed 129 black slaves (including men, women, and children) in the Illinois country. In 1732, they numbered 164.
The French almost certainly tried to convert these slaves to Catholicism. The Louisiana Code Noir, or Black Code of Louisiana, only permitted the practice of the Roman Catholic faith and made it imperative on masters to impart religious instruction to their slaves. Portions of the first Code Noir were instituted in 1685 for the French colony of Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti).
The Black Code of Louisiana was based largely on this document, with several key differences, mainly involving the prohibition of marriages between blacks (both slave and free) and whites. It was introduced in 1724 and remained in force until the United States took full possession of Louisiana in 1803.
As happened in New Orleans, the forced conversion of Afro-Caribbean slaves likely resulted in an amalgamation of Christian and Animistic beliefs. Animism is the notion that non-human beings—animals, plants, and even inanimate objects—have souls. In West Africa, Animism manifested itself in fetishes; man-made objects believed to possess supernatural powers.
Over time, the mixture of Catholicism and the tribal religions of West Africa evolved into Haitian Vodou (or Voodoo as it is known here in the United States) alongside the African American folk-magic of hoodoo. It was often the case that French Catholics interpreted these vestigial remains of West African religion as witchcraft.
Witchcraft in Illinois – Author Preview
A preview of my new book Witchcraft in Illinois: A Cultural History.
Witchcraft in England and Colonial America
The following is an excerpt from my new book Witchcraft in Illinois: A Cultural History. As a cultural history, I discuss how beliefs migrated from various parts of the world, most notably England (since the majority of Illinois pioneers were English or Scots-Irish). Order it today on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com
American society incubated during a time of great social and political upheaval in England. Protestants and Catholics, Parliamentarians and Royalists, alchemists and natural philosophers all fought over the hearts and minds of their fellow Englishmen. It was dissenters seeking to purify the Church of England from Catholic influence (Puritans) who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. The social rifts that chased the Pilgrims to America led to a series of civil wars in England between 1641 and 1651, which climaxed in the beheading of King Charles I on January 30, 1649.
At the beginning of those wars, most clergy and commoners embraced a fundamentally supernatural worldview. They believed invisible forces could and did influence their lives. Charms and conjurations, though against the law, were regularly used in rural England. Witches were people who, with the help of the devil, manipulated the natural world to wreak havoc on the social and natural order. They used maleficium (malevolent or harmful magic) to spread blight and disease, poison food and kill livestock, all with the aid of occult powers.
By 1640, English elites were increasingly skeptical of the existence of magic and witchcraft. The days of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (1487) were long gone. Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic, argued that a growing number of mostly Protestant elites, during the seventeenth century in particular, rejected the idea that the devil could influence people, let alone grant them occult power.
Pamphleteers and so-called “witch finders” like shipping clerk-turned-amateur prosecutor Matthew Hopkins found themselves on the defensive, and they began producing accounts of witchcraft in order to convince their contemporaries of its reality. Sensationalism and profit also drove the printing presses to churn out lurid accounts of trials and alleged liaisons with the devil. Witchcraft in seventeenth century England had become, essentially, a folk culture that both frustrated and fascinated the ruling elites, and those elites manipulated that culture for their own ends.
The Witch: A New-England Folktale
The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) is an entertaining, wonderfully atmospheric and historically accurate take on witch mythology in colonial New England.
Plenty of films claim historic accuracy, but you rarely see it. Mel Gibson is notorious for his pseudo historical (but highly entertaining) historical fiction movies. The Witch, though a semi-low budget horror film, puts those to shame. Listen to what the director says about his attention to detail.
“I am positive it is the most accurate portrayal of this period in American history on screen. We went to such lengths to make it so,” writer-director Robert Eggers told the LA Times earlier this year. “Everything with the farmstead that we built, everything that you see on-screen is made from the correct building materials that would have been used at the time. Most often we used the traditional tools and techniques to create these objects. And the clothing is hand stitched based on extant clothing.”
Ok, except the nails, which are round and not square like they would have been in the seventeenth century.
