Witchcraft, Quakers, and 17th Century Enlightenment: Why this Philadelphia Witch Trial
is Important
Why this Philadelphia Witch Trial
is Important
The Philadelphia Witchcraft Trial has been virtually forgotten probably because the women accused of witchcraft were found innocent by the jury. The Philadelphia trial took place nine years before the more famous Salem, Massachusetts witch trials where 200 people were accused and 20 people were executed for witchcraft. The hysteria surrounding the Salem trials explains the obscurity of the Philadelphia trial.
In–Group / Out–Group
Every society in every era of human history has had people it treats as outsiders. Powerful people treat the lower classes as inferiors. This is a fundamental characteristic of human psychology – our brains have evolved to discriminate between those like us on one side and the other side – the inferior, the foreign, the unknown, and the dangerous. We have developed an amazing range of disparaging and derogatory language to refer to people, especially the weak and powerless people, who are not part of the ‘in group’.
Our god is stronger than your god. Our planet is at the center of the universe. Our country is the greatest nation on earth. Our form of government is better than yours. Our freedoms are better than your freedoms. And my school, social class, occupation, political party, and bowling team are all better than yours. This in-group / out-group attitude is natural and generally improves one's chances of survival in a dangerous world. Those with little or no fear of the other and the unknown are at greater risk of losing their lives. Simply put, nature rewards those who fear dangers.
Those who worship my god are the true believers. Others are heretics or heathens. Derogatory names are powerful weapons against those who are different and they are effective tools confirming the truth of our views assuring the righteousness and goodness of those who look, act, and think like us. We are civilized they are the ‘barbarians’. They are ‘gypsies’, ‘witches’, ‘atheists’, ‘communists’, or ‘liberals’.
The Absurdity of the Trial
The Philadelphia Witch Trial took place at the end of a 300–year era of witch–hunts, trials, torture, and execution of tens of thousands of victims about 3/4s of whom were women. When this trial occurred the era of Enlightenment was still at its beginning. But William Penn and the early Quakers already rejected the idea of heretical out–group religious beliefs. Quakers saw a bit of the divine in everyone. No one was left out. Believing strongly in religious toleration and rejecting religious zealotry, dogma, and superstition, the Quakers emphasized practical wisdom, the worth of the individual, and the equality of women.
The trial appears as a complete contradiction to the basic values of the Quakers. Quakers had no formal religious principles, i.e., they rejected theology and creeds. Their message was simply to live quietly and listen for God. Something of the Divine can be found in all of us. They sometimes called it a divine light.
Your beliefs are irrelevant to salvation. William Penn expressed this notion of the inward gospel writing:
That blessed principle the Eternal Word...by which all things were at first made and man enlightened to salvation is Pythagoras' great light and salt of ages; Anaxagoras' divine mind; Socrates' good spirit; ...the divine power and reason, the infallible, immortal law in the minds of men, says Philo; the law and living rule of the mind, the interior guide of the soul and everlasting foundation of virtue, says Plutarch. (Quoted in Howard H. Brinton, Friends for 300 Years (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill Quakerback, 1965), p. 37.)
All of this still sounds a bit too abstract: no creeds, no theology, inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness.
The Quakers as Heretics
The elementary fact is that Quakers were treated as heretics themselves. William Penn and 13,000 other Quakers were imprisoned, during the reign of Charles II alone, for their heretical beliefs.
Since their beginnings, Quakers were frequently accused by their religious opponents of practising witchcraft. Consider John Marshall's review of the treatment:
Accusations that Quakers were witches and used the power of witches to ‘seduce’ others to their ‘heresies’ were legion in the 1650s. The Quaker leader George Fox was often alleged to have converted his followers by bewitching them, using magic objects or the power of ‘fascination’. Many quakers were subjected to the trials used to test if individuals were witches, such as ‘pricking’ the skin. A significant number of Quakers were prosecuted and imprisoned for witchcraft in the 1650s. Particularly prominent among those accused of witchcraft were Quaker women. Quaker works were condemned as diabolically inspired, and Quaker meetings were sometimes depicted as witches’ sabbaths; at many points, Quakers were diabolised in the Protectorate Press. (John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, Cambridge Univ Press, 2010, p. 297.)
How could a Quaker accuse someone else of being a witch when they, above all others, realized, by their own experience, that false-accusations were common and easy to make against those outside of the group in power.
Witchcraft was generally perceived as a form of communion with evil. Witches are in league with the devil. Witchcraft, then is a form of heresy. Anyone whose religious beliefs behavior were viewed as outside of the norm was liable to accused of heresy.
Enlightenment
The United States of America was not created in an instant on July 4, 1776. Our nation, our freedom, and our democratic traditions developed over a period of 150 years of colonial rule. The idea of self-government has ancient roots in Greece and Rome, in the Renaissance and humanist movement of the 14th and 15th centuries, in the protestant reformation and in the invention of the printing press. But the single most important influence on the founding of this nation as a moderate democratic Republic, is the Enlightenment that had its beginnings in 17th century Europe Britain and France.
In the 17th century, various thinkers, especially in London and Paris, began to believe that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny in order to build a better world. The central theme of Enlightenment is that human beings are capable of understanding the world by relying on careful observation and on critical thinking, i.e., reason. The intellectual authority of revelation, religious dogma, tradition and traditional authorities, such as Aristotle were questioned and often rejected by the critical evaluation of Enlightenment thinkers.
The Major Characteristics of the Enlightenment Adopted by William Penn and Early Quaker Settlers in Pennsylvania
As in all intellectual change, a very small minority of thinking men were engaged in this movement and only a few of the literate population possessed explicit knowledge of the leading scientists and thinkers (such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Marin Mersenne, Michel de Montaigne, René DesCartes, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Willis, and John Locke) at the vanguard of Enlightenment.
But even without explicit knowledge, the ideas of the Enlightenment slowly crept into the broader culture of Pennsylvania and profoundly influenced that culture.
John Locke advised Penn on the formation of the Pennsylvania government.
Penn's Frame of Government guaranteed secure private property, virtually unlimited free enterprise, a free press, trial by jury, and religious toleration. Whereas the English penal code specified the death penalty for some 200 offenses, Penn reserved it for just two--murder and treason. As a Quaker, Penn encouraged women to get an education and speak out as men did.
Jonathan Israel Democratic Enlightenment - definition of enlightenment
John Locke
Of these men, John Locke was the most influential force in American British and American political thinking. Locke's Second Treatise on Government provided the intellectual justification for the British Revolution of 1688-1689. This bloodless revolution replaced the reigning king –James II – with the joint monarchy of William of Orange and James the Second's protestant daughter Mary. Most importantly the revolution established the supremacy of parliament over the monarchy putting Britain on the path to parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy.
According to Locke, a government is legitimate only if it has the consent of the governed. The primary duty of government is to protect the natural rights of the people, namely the rights to life, liberty, and property. Should the government fail to protect these rights, the people have the right to overthrow the government.
What do we know?
One of the main questions asked by enlightenment thinkers was 'what is the extant of our knowledge?' 'What is it that we know?' Given there are so many different and competing religious beliefs, how can we know which ones are true? This was the beginning of religious scepticism.
Religious Skepticism
The first half of the 17th century from 1618 to 1648 was dominated in Europe by the Thirty Years' War fought between Protestants and Catholics. Somewhere between 3 million and 11 million people, civilians and solders were killed or died because of disease and famine exacerbated by the war.
England had two 17th century revolutions. In the first one (1642-1660) religion was at the center of the conflict between a Catholic king and a Protestant parliament. The result of the revolution, was the beheading of Charles I, in 1649, and the abolishment of the monarchy until Charles II returned to the throne in 1660.
People began to think of religion as a destructive force leading some towards religious scepticism. Others, perhaps less than fully conscious of the change, moderated their behaviour if not their beliefs.
Rather than exterminate those who fail to conform their beliefs with those of the majority, Enlightenment thinkers began to push for toleration of dissenting views.
John Milton (1608–1674), the English Protestant poet and essayist, called in the Aeropagitica for "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties".
In 1636, Roger Williams and companions at the foundation of Rhode Island entered into a compact binding themselves "to be obedient to the majority only in civil things". Lucian Johnston writes, "Williams' intention was to grant an infinitely greater religious liberty than then existed anywhere in the world outside of the Colony of Maryland". In 1663, Charles II granted the colony a charter guaranteeing complete religious toleration.[36]
Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. He published the Theological-Political Treatise anonymously in 1670, arguing (according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) that "the freedom to philosophize can not only be granted without injury to piety and the peace of the Commonwealth, but that the peace of the Commonwealth and Piety are endangered by the suppression of this freedom", and defending, "as a political ideal, the tolerant, secular, and democratic polity". After interpreting certain Biblical texts, Spinoza opted for tolerance and freedom of thought in his conclusion that "every person is in duty bound to adapt these religious dogmas to his own understanding and to interpret them for himself in whatever way makes him feel that he can the more readily accept them with full confidence and conviction."[38]
Locke
English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) published A Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689. Locke's work appeared amidst a fear that Catholicism might be taking over England, and responds to the problem of religion and government by proposing religious toleration as the answer. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, who saw uniformity of religion as the key to a well-functioning civil society, Locke argued that more religious groups actually prevent civil unrest. In his opinion, civil unrest results from confrontations caused by any magistrate's attempt to prevent different religions from being practiced, rather than tolerating their proliferation. However, Locke denies religious tolerance for Catholics, for political reasons, and also for atheists because 'Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist'. A passage Locke later added to the Essay concerning Human Understanding, questioned whether atheism was necessarily inimical to political obedience.
Pierre Bayle
Bayle (1647 – 1706) was a French Protestant scholar and philosopher who went into exile in Holland. In his "Dictionnaire historique and critique" and "Commentaire Philosophique" he advanced arguments for religious toleration although, like some others of his time, he was not anxious to extend the same protection to Catholics he would provide to differing Protestant sects. Among his arguments were that every church believes it is the right one so "a heretical church would be in a position to persecute the true church". Bayle wrote that "the erroneous conscience procures for error the same rights and privileges that the orthodox conscience procures for truth."[39]
Bayle was repelled by the use of scripture to justify coercion and violence: "One must transcribe almost the whole New Testament to collect all the Proofs it affords us of that Gentleness and Long-suffering, which constitute the distinguishing and essential Character of the Gospel." He did not regard toleration as a danger to the state, but to the contrary: "If the Multiplicity of Religions prejudices the State, it proceeds from their not bearing with one another but on the contrary endeavoring each to crush and destroy the other by methods of Persecution. In a word, all the Mischief arises not from Toleration, but from the want of it."[40] Act of Toleration
The Act of Toleration, adopted by the British Parliament in 1689, allowed freedom of worship to Nonconformists who had pledged to the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and rejected transubstantiation. The Nonconformists were Protestants who dissented from the Church of England such as Baptists and Congregationalists. They were allowed their own places of worship and their own teachers, if they accepted certain oaths of allegiance.
The Act did not apply to Catholics and non-trinitarians and continued the existing social and political disabilities for Dissenters, including their exclusion from political office and also from universities. - ---->
http://www.gendercide.org/case_witchhunts.html
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture By John Marshall
quakers were witches p. 297
If Anabaptism and anti-Trinitarianism provided for the sixteenth century the central examples of heretical and schismatic nightmares for the ‘orthodox’ in these ‘ Last Days,’ in the mid-seventeenth century England in a period which many also thought was that of the ‘Last Days’ when heresies and schisms were multiplying before the second coming of Christ, the Quakers and especially the Ranters provided the heretical and schismatic nightmares of all nightmares. Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment, p. 311
Penn's The Quaker Ideal of Religious Tolerance
The Secularization of the West
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