71 The Salem Witch Trials and Cotton Mather’s Apocalyptic Imagination

In 1693 Cotton Mather published Wonders of the Invisible World, his account of the Salem Witch Trials (1692-93). The following video by TED Ed offers a helpful introduction to those trials:

Here are some key points from the video:

The Salem Witch Trials are often referred to as the paradigmatic example of Puritan overreach—and it was certainly portrayed that way when later writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, began to look back at this period. And that’s probably not entirely inaccurate. However, this historical phenomenon and Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World help illustrate the power of the apocalyptic mindset that took root in New England. This mindset would eventually become overshadowed by more general Enlightenment views of progress in the 18th-century, but it re-emerged around the Civil War, and then again in the 20th-Century.

Overview of Christian Eschatology

Understanding the mental model of Cotton Mather requires a little bit of background into the early modern Christian mindset. In the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, it’s imagined that the world is a cosmic battle between Good and Evil, God and the Devil, Christ and the Anti-Christ (many similarities with Zoroastrianism). Here are the basic components:

Christians debate the precise details of when and how this happens, but it’s a common feature of most orthodox sects. Many medieval and early modern Christians interpreted history according to the magic number seven: just as creation happened in seven days, so there would be seven thousand years of history. By Luther’s day, the world was believed to be six thousand years old, which left another thousand years–the final aeon of time. This schematic allowed Luther and others to speculate that the Judgment of Christ was very near, occurring at the end of the six-thousandth year and before the next thousand (the “millennium” or reign of Christ).

If you’re confused about these interpretations of the end times, you’re not alone. There are many different flavors.

The earliest Christians took the millennium (thousand-year reign of Christ) literally, as though an actual historical “Christ Kingdom” would come to destroy their enemies, and then they would reign (4a). Beginning around the fourth and fifth century, however, the official Church doctrine shifted to a more allegorical view of Revelation—they interpreted references to the thousand-year reign of Christ to mean the Kingdom was already being fulfilled within the existing Church, and Christ’s Second Coming would inaugurate a new heaven and earth, not another earthly reign (4d). Revelation 20 was interpreted symbolically, not literally.

After Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other reformers broke with the Roman Catholic Church and founded various Protestant branches of Christianity (the “Reformation“), more zealous Protestants split from the main branches to found their own “purer” version. The sects tended to vary depending on how radically they wanted to do away with rituals associated with the Roman Church, then, later, the Church of England. During this period of reformation and continuous splitting, English Protestants and especially Puritans inherited and then continue to tweak the Christian view of eschatology (the end times). Some reformers believed normal history would come to an end with a violent apocalypse, after which Christ’s Kingdom would reign for a thousand years, followed by a new heaven and new earth. Luther adopted the position that Protestants would be persecuted and experience tribulations in the end times, culminating in the Second Coming of Christ. Apocalyptic Christianity became even more mainstream during the 16th-century.

Increasingly, reformed Christians followed Luther in interpreting the Roman Church (the papal Church) as the Antichrist. Around this time many early modern books were published that attempted to discern signs of the apocalypse in the events of Western history.

Luther revived the apocalyptic imagination and made it a central concern of early modern Protestants, but remained somewhat Augustinian in his belief that the true Christian Church was invisible. Yes, the world is moving towards the reign of Christ, but who belongs to the Devil vs. Christ is hidden and invisible. It’s impossible to tell who belongs and who doesn’t, he thought.

However, later reformers such as English Calvinists were more confident in their ability to identify who belongs to which side. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) reinforced the idea that Elizabethan England was an “elect nation,” for example.

New England’s Apocalyptic Zeal

When the Arabella landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1630, the New England Puritans believed their own Christian polity corresponded more accurately to the future Kingdom of Christ than anything else in the world. Luther, Calvin, then the Church of England had attempted reformation. This new colony was to be the most perfectly reformed church. “It was possible even in this world, Puritans thought, to tell who was a saint,” states William Charles Eamon.^[1] “Hence membership could be rightfully conferred only on those who were truly regenerate.”

As part of this project, John Cotton and other Puritan ministers tweaked reformed eschatology. They proposed that the “binding of Satan” would occur at some point in the future, followed by the millennial reign of Christ’s Kingdom, and those events would be kickstarted (so to speak) by the New England Puritan’s “city on a hill.” This model of the end times is shown above, in 4c.

The Puritan view of history provided them with immense apocalyptic zeal. They believed they were preparing for the final stages of world history, the apocalypse was nigh, and Satan would do everything he could to prevent them. In fact, they claimed, suffering and turmoil only signified that the Devil felt threatened and was attempting to throttle their progress.

Cotton Mather’s “Native Gothic”

The eschatological framing above helps make it clear how and why the Puritans so easily demonized the natives. Cotton Mather wrote in 1692, “New-Englanders are A People of God settled in those which were once the Devil’s Territories.” He feels confident in that statement precisely because of the Puritan view of history that informed so much of how they interpreted their settlements in the 17th-century. Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World assumes the following categories:

The margins of Puritan settlements were interpreted allegorical, as a “wilderness” under the domain of Satan. Those who stepped into the margins without proper support and devotion to Puritan theology became captives of the Devil.

By the end of the 17th-century, the typological interpretation of the natives as devilish others became intertwined with the captivity narrative. Americans were always already in a kind of captivity, or always about to be captured by dark forces–so thought Puritan chroniclers.

What’s remarkable, and highly pertinent to literary critics, is that this dramatic conflict between good and evil, wilderness and civilization, was taking shape in America long before the popularization of the Gothic Mode. The Gothic, as a literary genre, didn’t emerge until the mid 18th-century. In America it began to flourish in the 1790s. Long before that time, however, the tropes forged by Puritan beliefs and experiences laid the foundation for a proto-Gothic mode, what we might call the “American Frontier Gothic.”

As with the later European gothic that took shape with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), evil and darkness lurked at the margins of civilization. But whereas the forces of darkness in the 18th-century gothic would align with medieval ruins, the Roman Catholic past, and vestiges of aristocracy, New England’s proto-gothic imagination projected those forces onto the wilderness area and the native peoples.

Cotton Mather and the late 17th-Century Jeremiad

In Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World he portrays the Massachusetts Bay Colony as utterly fallen from the “city on a hill” that John Winthrop dreamed of in 1630.

Using a contemporary event to lament how far the people of New England had fallen away from the original utopia was, by Mather’s time, a familiar trope. It had been well-established by the Puritan Jeremiad, outlined so well in Sacvan Bercovitch’s American Jeremiad (1978). As students at CWI, you actually have full access to this excellent book, ebook available here (requires login)! Cotton Mather’s own father, Increase Father, preached a jeremiad sermon on King Philip’s War (1676), the traumatic event that was the setting of Mary Rowlandson’s own Narrative from 1682. Increase blamed the conflict on the present generation’s sin.

At the heart of the jeremiad was a cosmic conflict between good and evil, God and the Devil. The Puritans interpreted their 17th-century in the New World almost entirely through this dramatic lens. The Salem Witch Trials was its climax.

As students at CWI, you also have access to CREDO Reference through the library. They have an excellent entry on the “American Jeremiad” (requires student login). Here’s an excerpt: