The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane Read Free Page A

these thoughts traveled through her mind, she felt Beaumont’s dark eyes burning a tight round hole in the shoulder of her sweater.
    Connie gazed down at the surface of the table and traced the outline of the initials that had been carved there, darkened by decades of waxy polish. She roamed through the file cabinets in her brain, looking for the answerthat they wanted. Where was it? She knew it was there somewhere. Was it under W , for “Witchcraft”? No. Or was it listed under G , for “Gender Issues”? She opened each mental drawer in turn, pulling out index cards by the handful, shuffling through them, and then tossing them aside. The bubble of nausea rose again in her throat. The card was gone. She could not find it. Those whispered stories about students failing, they were going to be about her. She had been given the simplest question possible, and she could not produce an answer.
    She was going to fail.
    A haze of panic began to cloud her vision, and Connie fought to keep her breath steady. The facts were there, she must just focus enough to see them. Facts would never abandon her. She repeated the word to herself— facts . But wait—she had not looked under F , for “Folk Religion, Colonial Era.” She pulled the mental drawer open, and there it was! The haze cleared. Connie straightened herself against the hard chair and smiled.
    “Of course,” Connie began, shoving her anxiety aside. “The temptation is to begin a discussion of witchcraft in New England with the Salem panic of 1692, in which nineteen townspeople were executed by hanging. But the careful historian will recognize that panic as an anomaly, and will instead want to consider the relatively mainstream position of witchcraft in colonial society at the beginning of the seventeenth century.” Connie watched the four faces nodding around the table, planning the structure of her answer according to their responses.
    “Most cases of witchcraft occurred sporadically,” she continued. “The average witch was a middle-aged woman who was isolated in the community, either economically or through lack of family, and so was lacking in social and political power. Interestingly, research into the kinds of maleficium ”—her tongue tangled on the Latin word, sending it out with one or two extra syllables, and she cursed inwardly for giving in to pretension—“which witches were usually accused of reveals how narrow the colonial world really was for average people. Whereas the modern person might assume that someone who could control nature, or stop time, or tell the future, wouldnaturally use those powers for large-scale, dramatic change, colonial witches were usually blamed for more mundane catastrophes, like making cows sick, or milk go sour, or for the loss of personal property. This microcosmic sphere of influence makes more sense in the context of early colonial religion, in which individuals were held to be completely powerless in the face of God’s omnipotence.” Connie paused for breath. She yearned to stretch but restrained herself. Not yet.
    “Further,” she continued, “the Puritans held that nothing could reliably indicate whether or not one’s soul was saved—doing good works wouldn’t cut it. So negative occurrences, like a serious illness or economic reversal, were often interpreted as signs of God’s disapproval. For most people, it was preferable to blame witchcraft, an explanation out of one’s own control, and embodied in a woman on the margins of society, than to consider the possibility of one’s own spiritual risk. In effect, witchcraft played an important role in the New England colonies—as both an explanation for things not yet elucidated by science, and as a scapegoat.”
    “And the Salem panic?” prodded Professor Silva.
    “The Salem witch trials have been explained in numerous ways,” Connie said. “Some historians have argued that the trials were caused by tension between competing religious populations in