The Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son

Dr. Isaac Calcott arrived in Providence, Rhode Island in June of 1769. Well-dressed and in his thirties, Dr. Calcott claimed he could treat nearly thirty separate disorders, including "scale heads, St. Anthony's fire, vapors, King's evil, and deafness."

I don't know what most of those ailments are, but apparently they were quite Common in Colonial New England, because Dr. Calcott traveled through the region for the next four years, advertising his "Art of Curing" in all the local newspapers.

Although there were plenty of local physicians in the area in the 1700s, Dr. Calcott was part of a wave of itinerant doctors and healers who appeared in New England at this time. Most were men and came from Europe, although one Native American woman traveled through Essex County claiming to cure cancer through herbal treatments. Like Dr. Calcott, most also advertised through newspaper ads, but some relied just on local word of mouth.

These traveling healers were denounced by the more established doctors and often advocated highly unorthodox treatments. In addition to herbal treatments and elixirs, electrical devices were frequently used, often in front of a paying audience. These electrical demonstrations were part medicine and part entertainment.

Dr. Calcott didn't perform in front of an audience, but he did use a particularly strange technique. Here is an account of how he cured six year old Elizur Belden of blindness:

"Mrs. Belden holding the Child in his Lap, Dr. Calcott ... Licked the eyes, first putting his Tongue into one Eye and then into the other Eye of the Child - it was soon done, - and instantly the Child saw, and ever after continued to see well."

That account was written by Ezra Stiles, the President of Yale, after talking with Elizur Belden's parents many years after the cure. The testimony is reliable. The licking seemed to be effective, but why?

The modern scientific mindset would probably chalk it all up to psychosomatic illness, but Isaac Calcott claimed he had special healing powers because he was the seventh son of a seventh son. In many parts of Europe it was (and still is) believed that the seventh son of a seventh son has special abilities. Often these were healing powers, but in some places seventh sons could also predict the future and find lost objects. Wikipedia has a short but interesting article on this belief. In contemporary America, the seventh son motif is still popular in genre fiction.

The licking was also probably considered effective because spit was known to be a fluid highly charged with personal power. The average person's spit was often used in simple folk magic, but as the seventh son of a seventh son Dr. Calcott's saliva was obviously quite powerful. Jesus spit in a blind man's ear to make him hear; Dr. Calcott licked a blind boy's eyes to make him see.

Unfortunately the old adage "Physician, heal thyself" seems to apply to Dr. Calcott. Despite, or perhaps because of, his amazing powers Calcott was an alcoholic. Once, in Middletown, Connecticut, the good doctor was so drunk that two young boys were able to tar and feather him. He was last seen practicing his medical magic in 1773 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire before disappearing from the historical record.

I found this information in Peter Benes's article "Itinerant Physicians, Healers, and Surgeon-Dentists" in Medicine and Healing. Volume 15 of the Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

A Travelling Woman, Coarsely Dressed: Another Witch, Another Footprint

Here's a little story from John McNab Currier, a 19th century physician and folklorist:

In the summer of 1852 I was at a farmhouse in a rural town in Grafton County, New Hampshire, when a travelling woman, coarsely dressed, called to get a glass of water to drink, and inquire the distance to the next village. She drank the water and started on her journey. Scarcely had she gone thirty rods when the woman of the house said she believed the traveller was a witch, and she was going to try her. She immediately took a knitting needle from her work, found one of the traveller's tracks in the path, and stuck the needle into it. Almost immediately the traveller stopped, stood still, and gazed towards us, who were watching the trial. The woman of the house said she would not remove the needle from the track, even if the traveller should never move again; but she turned soon, and went on without stopping. The woman with the needle believed the steel had the power to fasten a witch in her tracks so she could not move, and shen she saw that the woman went on her way, she believed the power was lost by her speaking; so she tried another track with the needle, but without effect. 

It's interesting to compare McNab's story with a similar one I wrote about in March, which had two small children trying to test a witch with a needle, and was recorded in the 1920s or 1930s. McNab's story is a first-hand account of adults trying this form of folk magic 70 or 80 years earlier. In the 19th century witchcraft was not child's play.

Both stories involve women, seemingly poor, walking by houses. Is it their poverty and their mobility that causes such concern? I'm sure there's some sociological reason why these women were suspected of witchcraft.

The magic of steel seems to work in McNab's story, unless you want to be a skeptic and claim the travelling woman just stopped because she was amazed someone was sticking a needle in her footprint.

Even when it doesn't work there's an explanation consistent with the magic: the woman of the house spoke, and broke the spell. Maybe if she had never spoken a word the witch would still be standing in the road today. Silence is a key ingredient in some types of folk magic. Bittersweet root is best harvested in total silence, and a witch can be controlled with her own witch bridle only if you remain silent.

McNab's story appeared in the The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 4, No. 14, in 1891.

Healing the Weapon and the Wound

If you were cut by a sword in 17th century New England, either a family member or a village healer would take care of the wound. They'd clean it with water, bandage it, and possibly smear it with a salve containing herbs and animal fat.

If you were lucky, a highly skilled doctor (like John Winthrop Jr.) would also apply a salve to the weapon that injured you. Putting the salve on the sword would magically heal the wound it made on you.

This seems a little implausible to a modern New Englander, but the so-called weapon salve was grounded in a widely held view of the universe. This worldview claimed that if everything in the universe is connected, then the sword that cut you had a particularly strong connection to you. The weapon salve takes advantage of this connection to heal you at a distance.

This blog has a recipe for a weapon salve from the 16th century text Archidoxis Magia. Ingredients include human fat, moss that has grown upon a human skull, rose oil, linseed oil, and human blood. The ointment should sit for a while after it has been mixed. When someone is wounded, the doctor should dip a stick in their blood and then insert the stick into the ointment. The ointment is now ready for use.

Doctors in Europe and New England debated the efficacy of the weapon salve. Some claimed it didn't work, but those who claimed it did had a variety of reasons as to why. Some claimed it worked through magnetism, while others claimed it was the harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Some thought it was just the work of Satan.

I learned about the weapon salve a while ago and thought it was just another piece of folk magic that had long since disappeared. But I was wrong! The practice, or one very similar to it, survived until at least the 1980s in parts of Vermont.

Jane C. Beck, director of the Vermont Folklife Center, has interviewed many Vermonters about their traditional medicine practices. She collected the following piece of lore from a woman in Hyde Park, Vermont:

Similarly, it was believed that a nail that had been withdrawn from the foot, must be treated as well as the puncture wound itself. While salt pork was applied to the wound, the nail was carefully greased, wrapped up, and put into the warming closet where it would stay an even temperature. Today these supplementary measures are considered in holistic terms - treating the psychological mind as well as the body.

Although no skull-growing moss is involved, the theory is the same. Treating the item that injured you will cure your wound. I have no clue how the weapon salve evolved into this folk magic about the nail, but I think the continuity over 300 years of history is amazing.

I got the information about the weapon salve from Walter W. Woodward's Prospero's America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606 - 1676 (pages 195 - 196). Jane Beck's article "Traditional Folk Medicine in Vermont" appears in Medicine and Healing. Volume 15 of the Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

Praying Indians and a Tentacled Lake Monster

When Tony and I recently went out to Acton we also stopped by the neighboring town of Littleton. My parents lived in Littleton before I was born, but I had ever been there before this. It has some very beautiful rural areas, including Sarah Doublet Forest, the site of one of the 17th century praying Indian villages.

In the 1640s Reverend John Eliot of Roxbury, Massachusetts began trying to convert local Indians to Christianity. He had some success, and word spread to England. Donors there sent Eliot a significant amount of money to support his missionary efforts.

 Eliot used the money to found fourteen villages in Massachusetts for his so-called "praying Indians", including Natick, Ponkapoag (now Canton), and Nashoba (now Littleton). Although the villages had native names, Eliot expected their inhabitants to adopt not just Christianity but also an English way of life. Apparently hunting, gardening and a seasonally nomadic life were just too pagan. Instead, the Indians lived in wooden houses, raised livestock, and farmed like their Puritan neighbors. Men and women cut their hair in the English fashion and discarded their traditional dress for wool clothes.

It's estimated that up to 20% of Massachusetts Indians eventually lived in these villages, but since no villages remain you can correctly surmise things didn't turn out well. In 1675 the other 80% of the native population rose up to oust the English from Massachusetts in the conflict called King Philip's war. Although the praying Indian's pledged their support to the colonists they were nonetheless rounded up and confined to Deer Island and Long Island in Boston Harbor. Hundreds starved and froze to death during the winter of 1675 - 1676.

One of those who survived was Sarah Doublet of Nashoba. Sarah and a few others had made their way back to Nashoba, but eventually she became the last survivor of that praying Indian village. When she died in 1736 she willed whatever land had not already been taken by her English neighbors to Ephraim and Elnathan Jones, two local men who had cared for her when she grew infirm. The land eventually came into the hands of two women named Edith Jenkins and Fanny Knapp, who willed the land to Littleton in the 1970s.

The forest encompasses 500 acres, and includes old stone walls, the remains of a farmhouse, and lots of interesting rocks. I don't believe there is anything left of the Indian village. Despite it's tragic history the landscape is beautiful and peaceful.

Over at his blog, the author John Hanson Mitchell describes Sarah Doublet before her conversion:

She fixed pendants of swan's down or shells in her pierced ears, placed a bird wing headdress in her hair, and strung herself with shell necklaces and ropes of wampum, and perhaps --- all this is conjecture --- an amulet at her breast, a winged thunderbird, or the carved image of A'pcinic, the horned water monster who lived in the depths of the pond below her village.

A'pcinic the lake monster would have lived in Lake Nagog, which is adjacent to Sarah Doublet forest. Perhaps he still does. A'pcinic, who had a beak and horns, supposedly dragged his tentacled arms along the shoreline when hungry to find his next meal. Happily, I'm unable to confirm his existence through personal experience.

You can find more information about Sarah Doublet and Nashoba in John Hanson Mitchell's book Trespassing and at his blog. Daniel Boudillion also has lots of interesting facts about Nashoba and Littleton over at his excellent website.

Movie Review: The Lords of Salem

I needed some escapism this week, so I went this morning to see an early show of The Lords of Salem. Some people escape reality through comedies or eating ice cream - I like to watch horror movies. This one is based loosely on New England folklore, and was written and directed by Massachusetts native Rob Zombie - someone I went to high school with. How could I stay away?

Here's the basic plot. In 1696, Margaret Morgan and her coven of female witches lurk in the woods outside Salem Village, rolling around naked in the dirt and blaspheming while they try to breed the Anti-Christ. Interestingly, all the witches are marked with a glyph that looks very similar to John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica.

This glyph is very similar to John Dee's.

Jonathan Hawthorne, a dour Salem Puritan, puts a stop to their Satanic shenanigans by capturing them and burning them at the stake. As Margaret and her co-religionists graphically sizzle she curses Hawthorne, screaming that one of his descendants will bear Satan's child.

Three centuries later, Hawthorne's descendant Heidi Hawthorne is a recovering drug addict and hipster DJ who works at a Salem radio station. After Heidi plays a mysterious record from a band called the Lords, she starts to hallucinate about cackling witches, goats, and inappropriate sexual conduct with clergymen. Her bohemian landlady and her creepy sisters feed Heidi tea and scones, but somehow she (and the audience) are not reassured. Can Heidi be saved by a local historian, who realizes the music on the Lords record is the same tune Margaret and her witches played at their revels? (It sounds like death-metal folk music.) Maybe Heidi's fellow DJ and possible love interest will actually do something and help her out? Will anything good come of the Daughters of Historic Salem attending the Lords free concert in town?


Overall I enjoyed The Lords of Salem. Most of the exterior shots were filmed in Salem, which looks wonderfully gloomy and Gothic on the big screen. Old houses, brick sidewalks, falling autumn leaves, cheerless vistas of the Atlantic Ocean - it's like a big visual love letter to New England in November. Zombie definitely gets good mileage out of the local scenery. It's also beautifully filmed, with great sets and costumes. It was reminiscent of European horror movies like Suspiria, The Church, and The Sect: moody, well-designed, and vaguely nutty.

I didn't go in expecting historic authenticity, so I wasn't upset that The Lords of Salem twists the witch trials to suit its own purposes. It's a horror movie, not a history lesson. For example the real Salem trials happened in 1692, not 1696, and the witches were executed by hanging, not burning. And most importantly, the people executed were innocent citizens, not malicious Devil worshipers. Always remember that.

However there really was a Puritan judge named John (not Jonathan) Hathorne, who was an ancestor of author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Although Judge Hathorne wasn't cursed during the Salem trials, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes was. According to legend, Sarah Good told him from the gallows that "God will give you blood to drink." The reverend reportedly died from choking on his own blood. Nathaniel Hawthorne built the plot of The House of Seven Gables around this legend and his own ancestral guilt. Rob Zombie merges it with Rosemary's Baby to make The Lords of Salem.

Witches' Sabbath by Francisco Goya

There are lots of naked ladies in this film, writhing around, licking blood off newborns, and denouncing Christianity. There are also lots of goats. I feel like Zombie was inspired by Goya paintings and records of the European witch trials in his portrayal of the witch sabbath. The descriptions of the Puritan witch meetings, even though often extracted through torture, are very tame compared to those from Europe. Instead of having orgies and eating babies, the New England witches stood around (with their clothes on) and listened to the Devil, a man dressed in black like the Puritan ministers, talk about their plans to ruin crops and kill livestock. Basically they were a corruption of the Puritan Sunday church services - talky and kind of dull.

If you like stylish horror films I'd recommend seeing this one. It's not overly violent, but it was probably the most blasphemous movie I've seen in a long time. The Mosaic Church of Boston was actually holding services in the theater next door and I'm glad they didn't see what I did. That's my one warning - graphic blasphemy!

One last thing - Satan shows up in one scene looking like Bigfoot, which is pretty cool.