In some places, people leave Christmas decorations up year-around. In Salem, it’s a different holiday.
Approaching Salem
We arrived at the apartment in “Witch City” ( Salem, Mass.) a little after 11 p.m.after a 100-mile drive, two Amtrak trains, a Boston taxi, a MBTA train (picture) and a Lyft car ride.
The Trip to Salem: Southern Colorado — Chicago
The eastbound Southwest Chief, which originates in Los Angeles, rolls into La Junta, Colorado, at sunset.
A near-miss in Chicago: the sleeping car attendant had lined up everyone’s bags on the platform, which is a dimly lit.
I found my carry-on bag, rolled it into Union Station, down the corridors to Amtrak’s Metropolitan Lounge, and lifted it onto a shelf in the storeroom.
“Why does your bag have a Red Cap tag?” M. asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “I didn’t ask for that.”
It was not my bag.
I was just explaining the mix-up to the lounge superintendent when she spotted a man checking in at the door with . . . a silver carry-on bag.
He had kindly brought it for me from the train. He thought it was his.
All praise to Hermes for the quick save.
Last Chance for Chiles
Saturday the 14th — the last chance to eat some chile colorado before heading east for New England cooking. (Tres Margaritas, Pueblo.).
But . . . today’s Amtrak breakfast menu featured a quesadilla of sorts, making that the first time that I had been served green chiles on the train.
Hardscrabble Creek Is Now on Instagram
I am starting an Instagram feed for this blog, mainly for photos and short observations while traveling, like the trip to Salem that starts tomorrow. Follow it at letterfromhardscrabblecreek.
Obviously, longer posts (with footnotes!) will appear here only and will be mirrored on the Facebook page, unless Facebook becomes totally unbearable.
So if you use Instagram, join the small but plucky band of this blog’s followers!
The Crystal Dagger of Seville
That’s not a crystal athame. THAT’s a crystal athame.((Pop culture reference: Crocodile Dundee.))
A year ago I posted about three athames that I own. One of them has a crystal in its hilt.
Well.
About 4,000 years ago in what is now southwestern Spain, some group of people built an elaborate megalithic structure.
At least 25 individuals were interred within the structure , along with “an extraordinary set of sumptuous grave goods…the most notable of which is an unspecified number of shrouds or clothes made of tens of thousands of perforated beads and decorated with amber beads”. Additionally however, a large number of crystal arrowheads were found together, which be suggestive of a ritual offering at an altar. . . . In the second chamber archaeologists found the body of a young male aged between 17 and 25 lying in the foetal position along with a large set of grave goods. These included an undecorated elephant tusk laid above the young man’s head, a set of 23 flint blades, and numerous ivory objects. Additionally, red pigment made from cinnabar had been sprayed over the body and the objects surrounding it. The “remarkable crystal dagger blade”, however, was not found with these grave goods, but instead in the upper level of this chamber.
A sign of high status? A magical weapon? All of the above? There is a longer archaeological paper accessible here.
Found in The Daily Grail, in the sidebar.
For the Friends of Black Phillip
Yesterday’s post on movies related to Salem witchcraft mentioned The VVitch and the character of Black Phillip, the billy goat. (His real name is Charlie and he “still gives his director nightmares.”)
There is a billy goat in my magical menagerie too — not quite the same, but close enough that when I saw this pin and embroidered badge at Nerd Scouts, I had to have them.
Live deliciously!
Our Salem Film Festival
Prompted by J. W. Ocker’s A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts, M. and I held a little Salem film festival. (We skipped The Lords of Salem.)
In order of creation, we watched these three movies: Three Sovereigns for Sarah (1985), Hocus Pocus (1993), and The VVitch (2015).
(This looks like a bootleg copy, but I wanted this scene. Sorry about the quality.)
Three Sovereigns for Sarah, a three-part PBS documentary, is well-done, using authentic trial testimony in spots. Vanessa Redgrave, playing accused witch Sarah Cloyse, just dominates it — although she has some competition from the young actresses playing the “afflicted” girls.1
A historical consultant told Ocker, “We had a lot more power on the production than historians usually have on commercial things.” They were even able to nix Alexander Scourby’s casting as a judge, because Scourby would not shave his beard, which was historically inappropriate. Clean-shaven Patrick McGoohan replaced him.
The church meeting house where the Rev. Samuel Parrish holds forth was built for the movie, and like all 17th-century buildings, included recessed fluorescent lighting. OK, that’s a joke. But compared to the moody available-light shooting in The VVitch, Three Sovereigns for Sarah is lit like a TV soap opera, giving a sort of “witchcraft under the microscope” vibe.
On the plus side, it gives you the feel of what happened. And guess what — no one is hung for being an herbalist or a healer. That is romantic mush that started in the 1960s and 1970s. It may make you feel good, but it is not about what happened in 1692 in America — or elsewhere.
Importantly, the film gives Sarah Cloyce a speech in which she explains how neatly the witchcraft accusations matched property disputes in Salem Village. In other words, adults were feeding suggestions to the “afflicted” girls about whom to denounce. That is usually the way it works in “children’s crusades.”
BEELEEVE THE CHILDREN!
Of Hocus Pocus (1993), Ocker observes,
The witches are played by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Nijimy in, if not exactly career-defining roles, roles that will probably outlast anything they’ve ever done. There are entire generations of people who know Hocus Pocus, but have no idea about wind, wings, sex, city, hair, or spray.
Yes, but it’s Disney (kids win, witches lose). That is probably why I had no interest in it in 1993, and besides, I had student papers to grade. And Sex and the City will be Parker’s role that I remember.
If Three Sovereigns for Sarah presents a documentary-style take on the 1692 witchcraft panic, The VVitch gives us the imagined European witchcraft of the 16th–17th centuries transplanted to New England, where tiny cleared islands of Christianity struggle to survive up against dark walls of savage forests, In that, it echoes some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s spookier fiction, in which he dips from the same well.
But it’s a horror movie, so the central character witch is herself a teenager, not a mature woman. Of course you have your pact with the devil, the Witches’ Sabbat, spectral flight, possession, and Black Phillip, the goat who is more than a goat. In lighting, costuming, and general atmosphere, it is the best of the three. Unlike the other two, it was not filmed partly in or near Salem but near Kiosk, Ontario, in order to get the best cinematic forests.
Also, it gives me a segue into talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne and witchcraft, coming up.
- Sarah Cloyce is depicted . . . differently . . . by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I am coming to that. [↩]
“The World is Very Different from a Pagan Perspective”
How do you explain it them?
A couple of days I sat down with an interviewer who had read an old essay of mine, “The Hunter’s Eucharist,” also published as “The Nature of the Hunt.” (It appeared along with works by writers more articulate than I in A Hunter’s Heart: Honest Essays on Blood Sport, edited by David Petersen, one of the best nature writers out there.
When I wrote it in the early 1990s, I was maybe more sure of how to talk about the universe than I am now. At least, that is what I ended telling the interviewer, giving him the old story about how the American anthropologist Irving Hallowell, after learning that in the Ojibwe language stones are grammatically animated (treated as alive), asked a tribal elder, “Are all stones alive.” The man thought a moment and replied, “Some are.”
(Or maybe they are experienced as alive some of the time, depending on many things—that is me talking, not Hallowell.)
This interviewer was all right—not capital-P Pagan, but someone who had thought about nature, hunting, and spirituality quite a bit. To be honest, “spirituality” is not a term that I fully comprehend, but I have to use it here.
The more I live, the more complexity I sense in the seen and unseen universe. This makes it harder and harder to talk to monotheists, who think that we merely replace the True God with a set of inferior replacements but otherwise think and worship much as they do.
At the Pagan Square blog portal, Guz diZerega has started a series of posts called “Viewing the World through Pagan Eyes.” He puts the communication problem this way
Christian-derived views see the world as a collection of things initially created and ordered by God. Secularists accepting this distinction replace God with predictable laws. There is a deep distinction between human subjectivity, and the objective nature of everything else. Some secular scientists accept the dichotomy but reject consciousness as a fundamental property of reality, hoping to reduce all subjectivity to impersonal objective processes. The ‘illusion’ of mind is a side effect of determinism, and not an active part of reality.
A Pagan outlook implies what we call subjectivity and objectivity both exist ‘all the way down.’ People can be studied as if they were simply objects and there is an element of awareness in even the simplest phenomena, but reality includes both. This view is not unique to Pagans, some physicists share it, for example. But it is rarely treated seriously in many other sciences, particularly the social sciences. The social sciences usually incorporate the distinction between people and the rest of the world or, alternatively, seeks to understand us using the same ‘objective’ approaches used to understand all else.
I took the title of this post from Gus’s first post, and I am looking forward to reading them all. We need to realize how different we are.
Witches, Sea Captains, and Art — We Go Back to Salem
I am sipping this as I write.
Last November, during the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Boston, I made a quick trip to Salem, Mass., with some fellow Pagan studies scholars. It was only one afternoon—long enough to visit some of the witchy shops, a magickal temple, the Charter Street cemetery, and a few other sites.
No time for the maritime history or the highly regarded Peabody-Essex Museum or even all of the historic sites connected with the witch trials or other cultural history, such as the House of the Seven Gables.
So back I go in two weeks, and M. is going with me — a trip celebrating a wedding anniversary that ends in zero. We have lots of Amtrak reward points to spend, and it’s too early for gardening here. A rented apartment awaits us. Granted, winter is hanging on grimly in New England, but we will take our chances.
Our guidebook is J. W. Ocker’s recent A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts.
We have been preparing ourselves with a series of movies — more on that soon — and I actually read all of The House of the Seven Gables, with more of Hawthorne waiting on the bedside table, to put myself in a mood of dark Romanticism and decay.
Like Ocker, I wonder, “Why Salem did attract today’s witches? Why in the 1970s?” He has some ideas, which I will share later.
So consider this to be the first of a series of travel-related posts that will appear between now and Beltane, more or less.
A personal note: Despite her French surname, M. on her father’s side is New England Yankee all the way down. According to family tradition, the name came from some French Huguenot (Protestant Christian) who fled across the Channel in the 17th or early 18th century to escape Catholic persecution, the family transforming gradually into English Puritans.
Although they moved on to northeastern Vermont, they presumably came through Massachusetts. “So,” I tell her, “you might pass by an ancestor’s grave. Perhaps even one of the witch-hunters. . .”
And at that point she starts shouting at me.
What can I say? The Cliftons were Virginians who probably spent their Sundays sipping rum and betting on cockfights, not listening to two-hour sermons and hanging so-called witches.
On the other hand, she is willing to make the trip!