The Arrival of Rebecca Nurse and the Witch Doctor

A new character appears as Giles Corey, a muscular, wiry eighty-three-year-old farmer, joins the crowd in the room as Rebecca stands over Betty. Parris says that a witch-expert by the name of Reverend Hale is coming to examine Betty. Rebecca, John, and Francis try to convince Parris to send Hale back because it will cause speculation and more rumors to spread. Proctor gets fed up with Reverend Parris and actually insults him and the Puritan religion. He wishes that he could create a rebel group against Parris, and he ends up offending everyone; he even alarms Rebecca Nurse. However, he speaks his mind because he can’t help it, and he can’t stand Parris. Meanwhile, Reverend Hale, an intellectual man, arrives at Parris’s home with a heavy load of books. Hale asks Proctor and Giles if they have afflicted children. Giles says that Proctor does not believe in witches. Proctor denies having stated an opinion on witches at all and leaves Hale to his work.
Parris relates the tale of finding the girls dancing in the forest at night, and Mrs. Putnam reports having sent her daughter to conjure the spirits of her dead children. She asks if losing seven children before they live a day is a natural occurrence. Hale consults his books while Rebecca announces that she is too old to sit in on the proceedings. Parris insists that they may find the source of all the community’s troubles, but she leaves anyway.
Giles asks Hale what reading strange books means because he often finds his wife, Martha, reading books. The night before, he tried to pray but found that he could not succeed until Martha closed her book and left the house. (Giles has a bad reputation in Salem, and people generally blame him for thefts and random fires. He cares little for public opinion, and he only began attending church regularly after he married Martha. Giles does not mention that he only recently learned any prayers and that even small distractions cause him problems in reciting them.) Hale thoughtfully considers the information and concludes that they will have to discuss the matter later. Slightly taken aback, Giles states that he does not mean to say that his wife is a witch. He just wants to know what she reads and why she hides the books from him.

Portrait of reverend Hale

Date:1690s

Witches of Romania

Witches of Romania

 

Medieval Witchcraft

Witchcraft refers to the use of certain occult and spiritual practices to seek the assistance of the supernatural powers in resolving the problems whose solutions can not be achieved through the known rational means. The process involves reciting prayers and performing rituals in a certain specific format or craft. Prayers and rituals when performed with utmost sincerity and faith do quite often fructify into the desired results. Since there is no reasonable explanation for the manifestation of the result, they are termed miracles or magic. Witchcraft is therefore considered synonymous with magic.

Witchcraft has existed since man was born and he had to struggle for his survival against the unpredictable and unmanageable forces of nature such as famines, rains, floods, epidemics or some other occurrences at personal level  which could not be easily explained. Witchcraft had all the more reason to exist in the medieval times when human knowledge was still at a rudimentary stage and there appeared no other solution to day-to-day problems that confused and befuddled the people of those times.

In their desperation to seek the desired results, some times the practitioners of the witchcraft went out of the way of prayers and resorted to certain extreme practices and rituals such as the use of blood and so on or invoking evil spirits for help. Moreover witchcraft, like every other branch of knowledge, was manipulated and misused by vested interests. A few such cases here and there  gained  wide spread notoriety and provided the ecclesiastic powers, which commanded influence in formulating the secular policies of the kings and rulers of those times, an excuse to brand the witches or wizards as agents of  the evil or Satanic  powers. Now Satan is considered the greatest enemy of the Church and therefore God. Consequently any person who was suspected to be indulging in witchcraft was hounded out and persecuted with the punishment of death through hanging or burning at stake.
Persons accused of practicing the witchcraft were labeled as heretics. Once caught, the victim was coerced into confessing his crime through inhuman tortures and was either hanged or burnt alive during the inquisition. The law against the witchcraft was further exploited by the vested interests to score personal vendetta or to snatch the property or land of victims. Some influential persons in the society, in collusion with the priests, would manage to arouse suspicions against their targets as being witches or wizards. They victims were arrested, made to confess and killed.

Witches were generally portrayed as ugly old hags so as to make them the target of dislike and hatred, but the matter of fact is that they were and still are quite normal men and women and in some case witches were and are quite pretty and presentable ladies.

The witches used scrolls for witchcraft in those times. Some of them survive even today. Besides the spells, the witches also used some herbs and animal parts to make potions to cure some diseases and heal the wounds. Potions were brewed in cauldrons in order to combine them properly. Cauldrons were often made of wood, but other materials such as stones were also used. These potions, though denigrated as superstitious, were quite efficacious in those times as they are equally efficacious now.

THE MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT

THE MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT Nestled the harbour of the picturesque North Cornish village of Boscastle, is the world famous Museum of Witchcraft. This extraordinary museum houses the world’s largest collection of witchcraft related artefacts and regalia. The museum's history is as fascinating as its collection. It was first founded on the Isle of Man By Cecil H. Williamson in 1951. Cecil's lifelong interest in witchcraft and magic began with his first encounter with old West Country witchcraft as a child in the Devon village of North Bovey. He was befriended by the local witch, after defending the elderly woman from a group of thugs who suspected her of bewitching cattle. As an adult, he investigated the Craft of African Witchdoctors whilst working on a tobacco plantation in Rhodesia. He continued his fascination in Britain in the 1930's, mixing with leading experts of the day and even worked as an agent for MI6, collating the Occult interests of the Nazis. In 1951 Cecil first opened the museum in the ‘Witches Mill’ on the Isle of Man. Gerald Gardner, who he had first met in 1946, was employed as ‘Resident Witch’. Having very different ideas from one another about Witchcraft, and the direction in which the museum and its collection should be taken, their working relationship and friendship broke down. In 1954, Williamson sold the building and some of the collection to Gardner, who continued to run the Witches Mill as a museum until it was bequeathed at his death in 1964 to Lady Olwen (Monique Wilson), who unfortunately sold the collection in 1973 to ‘Ripley's Believe It Or Not’ in America. Wonderfully, a small proportion of this collection has recently found its way home to The Museum of Witchcraft – read details here. Following his parting of company with Gerald Gardner, Cecil moved his museum and its fascinating collection to Windsor, however Royal officials were not happy with the idea of a witchcraft museum in the area and suggested that perhaps it should be located somewhere else... So Cecil relocated again to the Cotswold village of Bourton-on-the-Water, where local Christians subjected him to death threats, strung dead cats up in his garden trees and repeatedly fire-bombed his museum. The final relocation took Cecil and his museum to Cornwall and in 1960 to Boscastle where it remains today.

Rebecca Nurse

Rebecca Nurse

Rebecca Nurse was an elderly and respected member of the Salem Village community. She was accused of witchcraft by several of the "afflicted" girls in the Village in March of 1692. Although a large number of friends, neighbors and family members wrote petitions testifying to her innocence, she was tried for acts of witchcraft in June, 1692. The jury first returned a "not guilty" verdict, but was told to reconsider, and then brought in a verdict of "guilty." Governor Phips pardoned her, but was later persuaded to reverse his decision by several men from Salem. She was excommunicated from the Salem church and hanged on July 19, 1692. Her house in Danvers, the former Salem village, still stands and is open to visitors. A large monument also marks her grave in the Nurse family cemetery on the grounds.

Elly Kedward

Elly Kedward 

n the winter of 1785, Elly Kedward was banished from the town of Blair after several local children accuse her of performing witchcraft. She was presumed dead from exposure, but the next year, all of her accusers have vanished. The residents of Blair fear she's cursed the area and abandon the town, vowing never to utter the name "Elly Kedward" again. 
In 1825, a year after the town was rediscovered and founded as Burkittsville, the villagers held the first annual Wheat Harvest Picnic. During the picnic, ten-year-old Eileen Treacle wandered off towards Tappy East Creek and drowned. Eleven eye-witnesses claimed to have seen a ghostly white hand reach up and pull her into the shallow water. Her body was never found, and for thirteen days afterward, the creek became contaminated with oily bundles of sticks, rendering the water useless. 

Townspeople noted the possible supernatural characteristics of the Treacle disappearance and were quick to blame the death on the Blair Witch.
In 1886, eight-year-old Robin Weaver alledgedly followed a woman who's feet didn't touch the ground into a house the woods. She took Robin into a house, where the woman locked her in basement and said she'd return later. Distressed, Robin escaped through a small window. A search party was dispatched, but while Robin later returned, the search party didn't. A second search party found the group disemboweled at Coffin Rock. When they returned to the site with help, the bodies had vanished without a trace. 

In late 1940, a hermit named Rustin Parr began abducting children from Burkittsville. He kidnapped eight children total and brutally murdered seven of them, letting Kyle Brody go. Parr confessed to the crimes in May of 1941, claiming he was doing what an old lady ghost told him. Parr was convicted and hanged later that year. 

Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray (1863-1963)

Why she’s on this list: If there’s a surprise inclusion on this list it’s Murray. Talking to friends the last 48 hours she was the one figure that everyone trying to figure out my “Top 5″ seemed to forget about. Murray was a well respected Egyptologist and mostly a serious academic (books like God of the Witches were obviously meant for a general audience) but is a major figure in the Modern Pagan Revival because of her books on Witchcraft and the Horned God.

It’s easy in retrospect to dismiss Murray’s Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921). Murray’s hypothesis that the innocents killed in Europe’s “Witch Trials” represented a secret underground pagan religion has been dismissed by a majority of scholars today, but the theory continues to hold a lot of power in Modern Paganism. Regardless of how factual the Murray hypothesis is, it became one of the founding myths of Witchcraft, and as a result Modern Paganism. In addition to providing a mythology, Murray provided the terminology that would become a part of many Pagan traditions. We use words like coven and esbat because they were words that Murray used.

Murray redeemed and legitimized the word “witch.” After reading Murray you want to practice Witchcraft and you want to be a Pagan. Her history of the Horned God in God of the Witches is everything you want a Pagan archetype to be. She traces the worship of Old Horny back to the Cave of the Three Brothers in France and its portrait of “The Sorcerer” to Pan and Cernunnos and then later Robin Hood. Murray’s Witch Religion is a faith of joy and exuberance and I’m certain that it influenced countless people to want to be Witches. She also endorsed Gardner’s version of Witchcraft writing the introduction to Witchcraft Today back in 1954.

Why she’s not higher: There’s only one person who could be number one on this list, but it’s important not to overlook Murray. Without Murray it’s possible that early Pagans might have all called themselves Druids or Heathens and the empowering mantle of witch would have never been worn in Contemporary Paganism. Certainly the influence of Murray’s “Witch-cult Hypothesis” will continue to fade in the coming decades, but her other contributions to Modern Paganism will continue. Besides even if Murray’s theory isn’t exactly true in the literal sense I think many of us will continue to feel a kinship with the women (and men) who were needlessly murdered in the name of religion centuries ago.