Not In Kansas Anymore by Christine Wicker Read Free Book Online Page A

church had whispered such bloody fantasies with such loving detail, we’d have slid to the other end of the pew and piled our songbooks up as a barrier.
    My surprise also has something to do with my ignorance of America’s occult history. I thought magical thinking was way, way in the past, back in Egyptian days, back to the Romans, important to the Celts, but after that it began to die. In fact, belief in magic has always been around. It just hasn’t always made the history books. Until the 1970s, few historians paid it much attention. The European and Salem witch trials are the exception, and it took a lot of killings for that to happen. But witch trials are only part of the story.Dabbling in the occult was, is, and always has been as American as the Pilgrim Fathers, more so even. In 1776, only 22 percent of the colonists in Massachusetts were Puritans, and even the Puritans practiced magic.
    â€œColonial Americans were, in fact, more likely to turn to magical or occult techniques in their effort to avail themselves of superhuman power than they were to Christian rituals or prayer,” writes religion scholar Robert C. Fuller. Most of them practiced a variety of magical practices such as astrology, divination, fortune-telling, and folk medicine.
    Church membership at the start of the Revolution was 17 percent, a figure so low that some scholars suggest that schoolroom pictures of early American Puritans going to church ought to be joined by paintings of drunken revelers. Seen together, they would give a more accurate understanding of America’s heritage. Boston’s taverns were probably fuller on Saturday night than its churches on Sunday morning.
    When Frenchman J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote about America in the late 1700s, he called religious indifference an American trait, along with selfishness, industry, litigiousness, and good living. The further inland he traveled, the less religious he found Americans to be. Even Christians didn’t let their faith curb their opinions; “general indulgence leaves everyone to think for themselves in spiritual matters,” resulting in what he called a “strange religious medley.” Much the same might be said today.
    People who came to America then, as now, were dreamers, adventurers, oddballs, and freethinkers. Many of the early settlers were criminals. They were people stout enough to believe that they could prevail against the wilds with nothing more than force of will. Some were joiners, but many were not. In short, they were perfectly constituted for transgressive thinking, and magic has often been that.
    As early as 1690, the Reverend Cotton Mather complained that Puritan Massachusetts was plagued by “little sorceries.” People used whatever was at hand—sieves, keys, peas, nails, and horseshoes—to tell the future and to keep enemies at bay. Salem’s witch trials began when adolescent girls put an egg in a glass of water, a popular way of divining that Increase Mather, father of the more famous Cotton, had warned against in 1684. A 1760 booklet called Mother Bunch’s Closet directed young girls to summon their future husbands by writing, “Come in, my dear, and do not fear,” on a slip of paper, putting the paper in a pea pod, and laying the pod under the door. The next person who entered would be the husband. “Dumb suppers,” at which no human was allowed to speak, were held on Halloween night to show the faces of future husbands and to summon spirits of the dead. Mirrors might be used, as they sometimes are today, for seeing the future spouse and for bringing back the dead.
    The highly placed also practiced occultism. John Winthrop Jr., the governor of colonial Connecticut and an alchemist, owned magical books from the library of Elizabethan England’s great magus and mathematician John Dee. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, was an alchemist. Other alchemists, mostly