Delaware Magic Ways: The Quaker Obsession with Spiritualism“We have not hoofs nor horns in our religion,” Quakers liked to say.1 But even the Children of Light were not without some belief in the supernatural. The history of magic in the Delaware Valley was a two hundred years’ war between old fears and a new faith—a running conflict between ancient superstition and the magic of the Inner Light. Many traditional forms of folk magic were carried to West Jersey and Pennsylvania by individual settlers. But the Quaker leaders of those colonies had no use for these “needless” beliefs and did their best to discourage them, without ever succeeding entirely in doing so. The old magic continued to be practiced and opposed in the Quaker colonies for many years.
As early as 1683 two elderly women named Margaret Mattson and Yeshro Hendrickson were accused of witchcraft, and brought to trial before the Proprietor himself. Both were Swedish, and required an interpreter in the English court. One of them, Margaret Mattson, was accused by her own daughter. Of the witnesses who appeared against them, one complained that the accused had bewitched his cattle. Another testified that while he was boiling the heart of a calf which he believed to have been killed by magic, Margaret Mattson came into his house looking visibly discomposed. A third declared that his wife “had awakened him in a great fright, alleging that she had just seen a great light, and an old woman with a knife at her bed’s feet.” On examination, the witnesses could not link any of their misfortunes directly to the accused Margaret Mattson herself, and the Proprietor’s court delivered a curious verdict which captured the ambivalence of attitudes toward witchcraft in Quaker Pennsylvania. Margaret Mattson was found guilty of “having the common fame of a witch,” but not guilty of practicing witchcraft. She was set free.2
This witchcraft trial was an exceptional event in the Quaker colonies. Pennsylvania had no laws against witchcraft in the seventeenth century. Its Quaker leaders showed great hostility to accusations, and actively suppressed persecutions of the sort that raged in New England with much encouragement from ministers and magistrates during the late seventeenth century.3
Popular belief in witchcraft was so strong in Pennsylvania that the governing elite felt compelled to act from time to time. In 1719, the justices of Chester County were specifically empowered to inquire into “witchcrafts, enchantments, sorceries and magic arts.” But the purpose of that order was mainly to discourage belief in magic itself, rather than to punish alleged malefactors.4
Still, ancient beliefs survived to the end of the eighteenth century. When the courts failed to act, mobs found other means to punish eccentric people who were feared as witches. In 1749, when a court refused to punish a man accused of wizardry, a riot occurred in Philadelphia. As late as 1787, an old woman was dragged from her house by a mob of youths, and stoned to death for witchcraft in the streets of Philadelphia.5 In Burlington, New Jersey, a gigantic sycamore of great age was long remembered as the “witch tree,” after an old woman was allegedly hanged from its branches by a mob.6
Here was a paradox that ran deep in the Quaker colonies. Friends who founded Pennsylvania were unwilling to persecute witches themselves, but unable to prevent persecutions by others. No witch was ever ordered to be executed by the courts of any Quaker colony. But witches continued to be mobbed, hanged and even stoned to death as late as 1787.
Prophecy and divination were also practiced by the ordinary people of Pennsylvania. In 1695, Robert and Philip Roman were brought before the monthly meeting, and later Robert Roman was presented by the grand inquest of Chester County, “for practicing geomancy according to Hidon, and divining with a stick.” For those offenses he was fined five pounds, and ordered to deliver to the court his learned books—“Hidon’s Temple of Wisdom, Scott’s Discovery of Witchcraft, and Cornelius Agrippa’s Geomancy.” There were also at least a few conjurers, witch doctors and fortune tellers among the Teutonic immigrants who founded Germantown. Their services were in demand by people seeking the recovery of stolen goods, the whereabouts of buried treasure or the removal of spells.7
But Quakers had no need of the devil to explain the existence of evil in the world, nor any use for geomancy to predict the future. Few believing Christians of any faith have ever shown so little interest in the black arts. Quakers commonly regarded the wrongs of the world as the work of man rather than the Devil—and especially as the product of carelessness, ignorance and human error.8
Members of the Society of Friends, particularly in the second period of their history, believed that error would be overcome by the magic of the inner light. Historian Frederick Tolles writes that there was a strong “tendency of the Friends to delimit the area of supernatural action and thus to widen the realm in which natural causes operated.”9
White magic, no less than black magic, was equally condemned by them. A Friend who turned to a conjurer or fortune teller could be disowned by the meeting. Quakers were also intensely hostile to astrology. For a believing Friend, the brightest heavenly stars paled against the shining of the light within.10
But the Quakers were not entirely liberated from magic. One particular variety of supernatural belief came to be very widely shared among them. The idea of the Inner Light led them to that form of superstition which is commonly called spiritualism today. In the seventeenth century there were repeated instances of attempts by Quakers to communicate with the dead, and even to raise them from the grave. In Worcestershire, for example, one English Quaker dug up the body of another, and “commanded him in the name of the living God to arise and walk.” There were many similar events in which Quakers attempted to resurrect the dead.11
They also believed in the healing power of the holy spirit. Keith Thomas writes that “for the performance of spectacular miracles there was no sect to rival the Quakers. Over a hundred and fifty cures were attributed to George Fox alone, and many other Friends boasted similar healing powers. … The early days of Quakerism had been marked by healing miracles on a scale comparable to those of the early church; they helped to make the Friends numerically the most successful of the sects.”12 One historian observes that “there are traces too of the Hermetic tradition, a belief that man has fallen out with the creation but that in a state of perfection (of restoration) unity can once more be achieved and nature’s secrets revealed.”13
Quakers also believed in reincarnation. Their concern for the welfare of animals was sometimes connected to this belief. It was written of Isaac Hopper that:
One day when he saw a man beating his horse brutally he stepped up to him and said, very seriously, “Dost thou know that some people think men change into animals when they die?”
The stranger’s attention was arrested by such an unexpected question and he answered that he never was acquainted with anybody who had that belief. …
“But some people do believe it,” rejoined Friend Hopper; “and they also believe that animals may become men. Now I am thinking that if thou shouldst ever be a horse, and that horse should ever be a man, with such a temper as thine, the chance is thou wilt get some cruel beatings.”14
In consequence of these various beliefs, two very different and even hostile sets of attitudes toward magic coexisted in the Quaker colonies, sometimes within the same head. That ambivalence continued for many centuries—even to our own time.