The views of witchcraft in North America have evolved through an interlinking history of cultural beliefs and interactions. These forces contribute to complex and evolving views of witchcraft. Today, North America hosts a diverse array of beliefs about witchcraft.Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America; Edited by HELEN A. BERGER; Copyright: 2005; Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press; https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fh7kf
Indigenous communities such as the Cherokee, Hopi, the Navajo among others, included in their folklore and beliefs malevolent figures who could harm their communities, often resulting in severe punishments, including death.Wall, Leon and William Morgan, Navajo-English Dictionary. Hippocrene Books, New York City, 1998 . These communities also recognized the role of medicine people as healers and protectors against these malevolent forces.
The term witchcraft arrived with European colonists, along with European views on witchcraft. This term would be adopted by many Indigenous communities for those beliefs about harmful supernatural powers. In colonial America and the United States, views of witchcraft were further shaped by European colonists. The infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, along with other witch hunts in places like Maryland and Pennsylvania, exemplified European and Christian fear and hysteria surrounding accusations of witchcraft. These trials led to the execution of numerous individuals accused of practicing witchcraft. Despite changes in laws and perspectives over time, accusations of witchcraft persisted into the 19th century in some regions, such as Tennessee.
The influences on Witchcraft in Latin America impacted North American views both directly and indirectly, including the diaspora of African witchcraft beliefs through the slave trade and suppressed Indigenous cultures adopting the term for their own cultural practices. Neopagan witchcraft practices such as Wicca then emerged in the mid-20th century.
Native Americans in the United States Native American communities such as the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Delaware, Hopi, Miami, Natchez, Navajo and Seneca have historically defined witches as evil-doers who harm their own communities. Witches are traditionally seen as criminals, and witchcraft as a crime punishable by death, if nothing else as a last resort. While some communities have passed laws specifically outlawing vigilante killings, traditional views of witches and witchcraft have largely remained the same into 20th century, and through to the present among traditionals. Alan Kilpatrick writes in The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery Among the Western Cherokee "A cursory survey of the ethnohistorical literature indicates that death was the standard punishment among Native American societies. Numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of random witch killings are recorded among the Chickasaw."
Witches in these communities are defined in contrast to medicine people, who are the healers and ceremonial leaders, and who provide protection against witches and witchcraft.
Cherokee The Cherokee have traditional monster stories of witches, such as Raven Mocker () and Spearfinger (), both known as dangerous killers.
Among the Cherokee, the medicine people are seen as a "priesthood caste", known to work together in groups to help the community. As in other Native communities, they are defined as the opposite of witches, who are seen as criminals,
Cherokee healers have "doctored" dogs so the dogs can help them detect witches.
As in the other tribes that have agreed to talk to anthropologists, witchcraft has been traditionally punished by death in Cherokee communities. In 1824 the western Cherokee passed new laws "forbidding the wanton killing of suspected witches", however, this attitude and retribution appears to have continued at the same rate in both the Cherokee and Creek communities throughout the 19th Century. In the twentieth century, many communities responded to allegations of witchcraft with mental health treatment, including medication. But despite changes in laws and perspectives, Kilpatrick (quoting Shimony (1989)) wrote in 1998 that one does still occasionally read about "the demise of a suspected witch in Native American communities" but that most of these deaths take place "only while the witch is in animal guise (by shooting) or by means of counter-witchcraft".
Hopi The Hopi have many beliefs and concerns about witches and witchcraft.
Suspicious deaths are often blamed on witchcraft, with members of the community trying to figure out who might be a witch, and who might have caused the death or other misfortune.
Navajo There are several varieties of those considered to be witches by the Navajo. The most common variety seen in horror fiction by non-Navajo people is the (a type of ), known in English as the skin-walker. They are believed to take the forms of animals in order to travel in secret and do harm to the innocent.Wall, Leon and William Morgan, Navajo-English Dictionary. Hippocrene Books, New York City, 1998 . In the Navajo language, translates to 'with it, he goes on all fours'. Corpse powder or corpse poison (, literally 'witchery' or 'harming') is a substance made from powdered corpses. The powder is used by witches to curse their victims. Traditional Navajos usually hesitate to discuss things like witches and witchcraft with non-Navajos.Keene, Dr. Adrienne, "Magic in North America Part 1: Ugh. " at Native Appropriations, 8 March 2016. Accessed 9 April 2016: "What happens when Rowling pulls this in, is we as Native people are now opened up to a barrage of questions about these beliefs and traditions ... but these are not things that need or should be discussed by outsiders. At all. I'm sorry if that seems "unfair," but that's how our cultures survive." As with other traditional cultures, the term "witch" is never used for healers or others who help the community with their ceremonies and spiritual work.
British America and the United States Witchcraft was a pressing issue during the early colonization of the United States. Witchcraft in the colonies was the alleged power one had to use supernatural abilities to influence people or events.Lewis, Ioan M, and Jeffrey Burton Russell. "Witchcraft." Encyclopædia Britannica, 22 Aug. 2016, In these early times, witchcraft was used to explain events that otherwise could not be understood.Games, Alison. Witchcraft in Early North America. Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. People were killed over these accusations when in reality they held no real merit at all. Though the Salem Witch Trials is the most commonly known case of witchcraft, it happened all over British North America. It was an epidemic in the United States that caused many to fear for their lives, whether they were being accused, or they were fearing those who were thought to be a part of it.
Many accused witches would be packed in local jails. In 1692, the royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, William Phips, created a special court in order to try the accused witches. The court was called the Court of Oyer and Terminer which means "to hear and determine". When the witches were being accused they were always guilty until proven innocent, rather than innocent until proven guilty. The presumption of being innocent is one of the key elements to a fair trial, which none of the accused were being given. Also, none of the witches were represented by counsel. They had no defense lawyers present which could have changed the trials drastically. When being accused of witchcraft, the accused were being stripped of even their basic rights that should have been granted under English law. The witchcraft that took place in early colonial America had an immense influence in law at the time and even today.Drake, Frederick C. "Witchcraft in the American Colonies, 164762." American Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 4, 1968, pp. 694–725, The Johns Hopkins University Press
The Inquisition in Europe lasting from the twelfth through eighteenth centuries created widespread precedent for the persecution of witches in colonial America, and ran in parallel with the persecution of other groups deemed a threat to the Roman Catholic Church. Derived from papal authority and enforced through a collaboration of church and state, the judicial procedures embodied in the Inquisition were aimed at prosecuting heretics, among whom were initially the Catharists in southern France and the Waldensians in Germany and Italy. But by the emergence of the Spanish Inquisition in the late fifteenth century, Inquisitors targeted Conversos, Jews who had converted to Catholicism but were suspected of disloyalty to the faith. It was in this period that the Church began linking witchcraft to heresy, particularly in southwestern Germany where witch hunts intensified by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was, in fact, a German inquisitor and clergyman, Heinrich Kramer, who wrote the definitive bestseller on witchcraft and torture in 1486, Malleus Maleficarum, a book upon which other Inquisitors relied. It was not until the sixteenth century that the Inquisition fanned out to hold ex-Muslims and Lutherans accountable for suspected heresy, with the latter deemed the primary threat. Although witch hunts themselves had been a rarity in New England prior to the Salem Witch Trials, historians view these trials as coextensive with witch hunts emerging during the Inquisition.
Arizona
Connecticut
Alse Young was the first person on record to be executed for witchcraft in Colonial America. She was a resident of Windsor, Connecticut, and was hanged at a meetinghouse. Alse would be the first of many more who were condemned in Colonial America for witchcraft.Cavanaugh, Ray. "Where Was the First Woman Condemned for Witchcraft? Not in Salem." The New York Times, 26 Oct. 2017
There was a woman who claimed to have seen her dead baby in a dream and was accused of witchcraft and ultimately killed. Connecticut's witch trials were among the first trials in New England, but often get overlooked by the more numerous and publicized trials that occurred after. Connecticut had over 40 witchcraft cases which resulted in 16 executions. Witchcraft in early colonial America was never overlooked because those who participated were thought to have an agreement with the devil, therefore choosing him over God and obtaining supernatural powers.
Massachusetts
In 1645, Springfield, Massachusetts, experienced America's first accusations of witchcraft when husband and wife Hugh and Mary Parsons accused each other of witchcraft. At America's first witch trial, Hugh was found innocent, while Mary was acquitted of witchcraft but sentenced to be hanged for the death of her child. She died in prison.
In 1648 Margaret Jones was the first person to be executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay Colony. From 1645 to 1663, about eighty people throughout England's Massachusetts Bay Colony were accused of practicing witchcraft. Thirteen women and two men were executed in a witch-hunt that lasted throughout New England from 1645 to 1663.Fraden, Judith Bloom; Fraden, Dennis Brindell. The Salem Witch Trials. Marshall Cavendish. 2008. p. 15. The Salem witch trials followed in 1692–93. These witch trials were the most famous in British North America and took place in the coastal settlements near Salem, Massachusetts. Prior to the witch trials, nearly three hundred men and women had been suspected of partaking in witchcraft, and nineteen of these people were hanged, and one was pressed to death for refusing to plead.