Review : The Ruin Of All Witches

Having thoroughly enjoyed Malcolm Gaskill's Witchfinders, I had really no choice but to try his latest book, The Ruin Of All Witches. And this is definitely a worthy sequel, if anything offering a stronger narrative, better prose, and more insight.

Whereas Witchfinders follows the history of notorious witchfinders Hopkins and Stearne and in so doing covers a plethora of "witches" they claimed to have found, Ruin takes the opposite approach. Here he follows the story of a single community, concentrating on three principle characters : the couple Hugh and Mary Parsons, and the rather hapless town leader William Pynchon. Hugh and Mary were accused of being witches both by the wider populace and by each other. Pynchon was a generally respected figure but, commensurate with the witchcraft allegations, accused of heresy for daring to say that God was probably quite a nice chap and not a fearful figure of vengeful wrath.

As previously Gaskill does a first-rate job of setting everything in its proper context. This is done on both the larger scales of the prevailing but shifting world view of puritanical Calvinism, the enormous instabilities and uncertainties of daily life, economic imbalance and stupendous social pressures, but also on the smaller scales : the particular pressures brought to bear on individuals, their personal aims and psychology - especially in treating them as complex individuals who don't always conform to the accepted social norms of the day*. He also shows how the mentality of the times was gradually shifting, and the prose is generally better and more dramatic than in Witchfinders without sacrificing clarity. He does still have a tendency to go into unnecessary detail from time to time, but this is rather reduced, and it's significantly less repetitive than Witchfinders. While I don't agree with a quote on the back that it's literally the best history book ever, I'm still tempted to give this a 9/10.

* Including, oddly enough, one young lad caught... manhandling himself outside church.

One significant novelty in this book is that Gaskill puts everything on a firmly environmental footing. That is, the realms supposedly inhabited by witches are ones of mist and murk, shadows in the cold dark, dreamlike states where the senses aren't always reliable - especially in a world of constant exhaustion from over-work, a strong prevailing belief in the supernatural, and more deep-rooted psychological problems caused by the monstrous teachings of Calvinism.

Strongly implicit throughout all this is the deeply interesting question : how do we really judge the truth at all ? It's not easy, for instance, to prove from first principles that the Earth goes around the Sun. Without good measuring devices and observational equipment this is astonishingly difficult. By embedding the reader as deeply as one can in the world of 17th-century Britain and America, Gaskill forces us to realise that this problem goes further, that how we decide what counts as "rational" is itself an extraordinarily difficult issue. Indeed, Gaskill does this with such refined skill that I often had to check myself and remember I was reading a history book about witchcraft, not a story about genuinely magical witches. Gaskill forces the reader to think critically for themselves about the allegations made, which is no bad thing at all.

I will not try a summary of the narrative. It's a slow burn at first but does pick up the pace, becoming ever more full of twists and turns right until the very end (it has serious mini-series potential, either as a drama-documentary or, perhaps better, as a straightforward historical drama). But there are a few general points I want to extract.

1) The role of religion

Let me start with the obvious. The idea that the belief in any sort of deity, or other supernatural aspect to the world, leads inevitably to witch hunts, crusades and all other sorts of nasties is just complete and utter bollocks. It's one of the stupidest ideas that somehow grips the minds of otherwise intelligent people, but it has no more credibility than a belief in the Flat Earth or goblins. But this is very far from saying that religion played no role in all this at all.

In particular, Protestantism. And especially above all Calvinism, which so far as I can tell is absolutely morally vacuous. This idea of absolute determinism in which God has preordained every outcome, such that at most all you can do is learn who's going to heaven and who to hell, is bad enough on its own*. As soon as you think that you don't really have a choice, you lose any semblance of responsibility for your actions. But worse was that this was coupled with a belief that God's standards were simply unreachably high, with the consequences utterly extreme.

* Gaskill mentions the cult-like Antinomians, who believed this so fervently that they felt themselves exempt from the Ten Commandments.

As one New England minister preached that year : "You husbands, wives, masters, servants : remember, if you are not good in your places, you are not good at all."

Failure... meant not not just exile from Christ but a kind of reunion with Satan. Passing this test, on the other hand, came more as relief than triumph, after years of feeling wretchedly lost. It also reminded others, as yet unredeemed, that they were eternally lost until they proved otherwise. This strained, opposing way of seeing oneself and the world, poised between flesh and spirit, self-loathing and elation, was part of daily life... caught between guilt and righteousness.

Both towns were locked in an existential battle between Christ and Antichrist. Hunger and disease were attributed to sin, Indians and demons were elided as enemies, and survival hinged on the merciful dispensations of grace. And at their beating heart was the message, which the Saints drummed in repeatedly : "the devil is amongst thee now."

... exacerbated by the Puritan equation of satisfaction with sinful pride.

This was made all the worse because the perpetual, inescapable judgement of the community. In Providence Lost, Paul Lay describes Protestantism as a "surveillance society of the soul" which inevitably fostered paranoia, and Gaskill makes this abundantly clear :

Ever the wayward servant and disappointing wife, even in this fantasy world [of her dreams] of escape from the mundane, she was being punished by her cruel husband and judgemental female neighbours.

So you have a world of constant judgement and unreachable standards, where you failed the tests if you were merely satisfied with your success, and even trying to get away from this nightmare fed suspicion :

But his sleeping out alone, away from his family, struck people as unusual, sinister even. To remove oneself from the community was voluntary exile from the binding covenant that kept it together. James I* himself had alerted his subjects to the "witch's natural melancholic humour", signs of which included, "desire of solitude."

* Elsewhere Gaskill notes, as I've seen other historians also explain, that James has been somewhat misunderstood as a witchfinder. His Daemonologie is perhaps better seen as a guide to make the procedure more rigorous rather than an attempt to encourage more witch-hunts, having the opposite outcome to its intent.

It's small wonder that eventually this created self-feeding spirals of paranoia which went completely out of control, manifesting themselves as witch hunts. At least stoicism, while it seeks a degree of emotional control which is frankly self-destructive, acknowledges the difficulties inherent in this, and doesn't come with a surveillance society or eternal damnation as the result of the most minor failure. 

The austerity of Protestant religious worship also created a tension with the desire for more wealth and success. If you didn't accrue wealth, you were a moral failure as well as a financial one. While there might be limits to how much wealth you should seek, these limits seem to have been pretty high, and wealth inequality certainly seems to have played a role as well. Quite how anyone squared the circle of a desire for austere religious worship with a moral drive to get richer, I don't know, but I'd bet that this too played a part in feeding the underlying conflicts.

2) The insanity of work

Which leads me on the second theme, the sheer mental and physical exhaustion of the lifestyle. Here I have to believe that Gaskill must be exaggerating, because if it was bad as he portrays, then I can't understand how everyone didn't simply fall over dead. The drive towards a strong work ethic is nothing bad in itself, if it means you want to apply yourself fully to do the best task you can. But this devotion to work as life, that this should be essentially all you ever do, all the time... this is mad. No. When you do something, you should do it well. This doesn't mean that your life must be nothing but toil.

There was no clear division of labour. Men might be artisans and farmers, like Hugh Parsons, and still do jobs for Pynchon. They toiled in enervating heat and bone-chilling cold, felling timber, excavating stumps, sawing planks, splitting shingles, breaking rocks, digging drains, diverting streams, shoring banks, building hedges and laying causeways. They mowed meadows, stacked hay and boxed pine trees for pitch and resin. They tended cattle and sheep, netted pigeons and caught fish on deerskin lines, as the Indians had taught them... 

At the end of the six-day week, labourers rested aching muscles and rubbed grease into cracked hands. The Sabbath, kept holy by law, began at sunset on Saturday and ended the following night - though Pynchon, preferring the 'natural Sabbath', hated people using Sunday evenings for games or 'the servile works of their particular callings'.

Hugh Parsons in particular seemed to be a man obsessed with work even by the standards of the time. Small wonder that with such people forming the bedrock of the community, the town grandees tended to exploit this, with a system of taxation and debts that only encouraged ever-greater workloads. The mentality of the time seems to have been one of the worst combinations of meritocracy and religion : that if you were a good person you'd succeed no matter the odds, and if you failed then this was because God had declared you a damned sinner. Free will, errors and accidents didn't feature in this way of thinking. This was even true of Pynchon, convinced as he was of God's benevolence.

Where I think Gaskill surely must be overstating the case is just how fucking awful life must have been back then. Oh, I don't doubt it was dreadful (literally, full of dread). I accept the sheer amount of hard physical labour must have been ghastly. I accept that natural disasters proved devastating with a frequency unknown to the modern West. I just think that it can't possibly have been as bad as Gaskill implies; he states the negatives commendably well, but any positive aspects at all - and there must have been some - are barely mentioned. To me the hardship seems so great that everyone would simply die, whereas in fact the town (eventually) flourished. Some more quantitative estimates as to just how bad the natural disasters (in particular) were would have been would helpful : okay, crops failed, but what exactly does that mean ? That nobody ate anything for the whole season ?

This minor niggle aside, the environment in which this unending labour occurred also deserves some mention :

She was born in about 1610 in the Welsh Marches, the wild borderlands... a patchwork of traditions bound by folklore and magic and anciently sunk into the landscape. Caves and mountains, ruins and springs, were sites of legends that told of miracles and murders, ghosts and fairies, kings sleeping under hills. Visions of black men and hideous dogs scared travellers, jolting them into mending their ways.

Yet residential Spingfield's southern boundary remained... a remote place, damp and misty by day, by night unnervingly dark and quiet. The land, stretching into infinite distance, still belonged to nature. This was where Hugh and Mary Parsons set up home, on the extreme edge of a town that was itself situated at the edge of New England.

One blue-black night, something crept out of the crawling mist. Hovering, dancing lights, like white flames tinged with colour, rose and fell, disappeared and reappeared... back in Wales these ghostly apparitions presaged a death.

Native religion was a backdrop to colonial witch-beliefs in a country as yet unconquered for Christ. Indian culture was spiritualised, sensitive to nature, with unseen forces sensed in everything from bees humming and birdsong, to tempests and dreams. But inevitably it was seen through an anxious Christian lens, which polarised goodness and evil. Therefore, like most colonists, Mary supposed that the natives were at least unconsciously, in league with the devil.

Yet Gaskill finds that this is only part of the story, with the main factors leading to witch-hunts being competition, overwork, and exploitation. The belief in the supernatural was not the instigating force but rather itself provided only context, with the real drive that set neighbour against neighbour being economic forces. The supernatural beliefs only shaped the way these moments of antagonism manifested themselves, rather than initiating them.

3) The mixture of mindsets

This last claim seems particularly appropriate in light of William Pynchon. His theology was far more merciful than the typical fire and bloodshed of mainstream puritanical Calvinism of the time. Actually this is something Gaskill handles well in general, making it clear that the society of Springfield and New England was not the only one present in the New World. Even among the colonies, others had founded far more liberal, tolerant approaches. There was as yet no unity at all in what would eventually become the United States (if there even is today).

Pynchon's main tack away from Calvinist doctrine was that Jesus did not suffer on the cross as a result of God's wrath. Mankind was not redeemed by Christ's suffering itself but his dutiful obedience to his father.

This was a different interpretation of the Trinity... and a dangerous one. It fundamentally changed the identity of identity of God and Christ... For this was a sermon about earthly conduct as well as salvation, about love and obedience, just as Christ's Atonement consisted in his loving obedience to God. Whatever wrath existed between men in Springfield, Pynchon taught, it came from the machinations of Satan.

In this scheme... the devil was no mere trickster, but rather a monster defined by perpetual fury and restless intrusion into daily life.

One of the weaknesses of Providence Lost was that Lay describes in detail what happened to certain heretics, but doesn't get into the mindset behind why it happened. It can be extremely difficult to comprehend why apparently minor points of theological detail should lead to brutal chastisement, and here Gaskill does a better job. Why did everyone else prefer to believe in this vengeful God ? Pynchon's implication was that Satan was far more powerful than his peers believed, potentially undermining the whole basis of the existence of God's chosen people - indeed seeming to refute the idea of God as all-powerful. In a world where survival hinged on unity, to challenge one of the community core beliefs was indeed dangerous. Incidentally, this much greater role for Satan is quite different to Witchfinders, where the devil was at most a minor side-character.

Other conflicting mindsets were also at work. The extremist Antinomians were not at all popular :

They were not therefore surprised when the Antinomian figurehead, Anne Hutchinson, miscarried : 'for as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.'

This is a very clear case in the belief of the supernatural, almost to the degree of idealism in which mind and matter are inextricably linked. Yet there seems to be a paradox right at the heart of this world view, of God being all-powerful in creating a predetermined cosmos but in deciding to populate it with such a myriad of evil things.

Conclusions

Gaskill pains a view of 17th-century New England (not America more widely, noting again that other states did not much share this perspective) as thoroughly toxic and conflicted from head to toe. The environment was not only physically harsh and dangerous, but it also readily fostered supernatural beliefs. In a world without any real measuring equipment to speak of, dreams and reality all too easily blurred. A shadow became a wolf; a frog became an imp. Couple this with perpetual exhaustion, constant judgement, belief that the fates were unalterable and that financial success equated with moral character, and it's only a miracle that witch-hunting didn't outright explode as it did elsewhere.

Further mental conflicts were at work. Not only across America more generally, but also in New England beliefs were shifting over time. As in old England, court trials did in fact require evidence, and (without giving spoilers), courts elsewhere took a very dim few of these rather foolish-sounding provincials. The shift was hardly linear, however, with accusations remaining frequent even as convictions declined : the experts shifting more rapidly to a more modern, rational world view than the general populace, who still continued to enact, on occasion, mob justice. This even applied to individuals themselves, with Hobbes writing that, 'though he could not rationally believe in witches, yet he could not be fully satisfied to believe there were none'.

But belief in witches did eventually subside, partly due to a more materialist world view and changing theologies, and partly politics. Satan became a mere instrument of God's will rather than a rival; visions of hellfire and damnation became only figurative images, firmly rhetorical rather than literal. Whereas in Springfield Pynchon's attempts to preach for amity only made things worse, leaving no recourse to individuals who felt genuinely threatened but to seek the dangers of magic, elsewhere toleration for diverse viewpoints rendered witchcraft utterly impotent. Where toleration of views was encouraged, accusations of witchcraft were all but absent.

The Connecticut valley was more politically stable, its towns economically varied and better governed. Controversies were brief : clashing neighbours calmed by litigation. Keeping the peace was an end in itself rather than a means to appease God.... By allowing for diversity, the law nurtured the confidence to prosper, while governors felt less threatened by dissent.

In the end, the city of devils - 'pandemonium', the capital of hell - was not demolished : it could only be starved of attention by people with fewer uses for magic than their parents and grandparents. After 1800 the demonic foes of Christian civilisation were not chased away : witchcraft faded into irrelevance, and its adherents sank bank into the ether. 

The really interesting question here, of course, being if there are more general conditions under which toleration leads to confidence versus a collapsing polarisation. I leave this for another time.