Transatlantic Cunning: English Occult Practices in the British American Colonies

Abstract

Jon Butler’s examination of ‘the survival of European occult or magical practices in the American colonies, especially astrology, divination, and witchcraft’ highlighted that, in spite of a lack of orthodoxy, ‘American colonists were indeed religious, but many resorted to occult and magical practices’.1 Refining this notion, David D. Hall has suggested that ‘we do better if we perceive an accommodation between magic and religion than if we regard magic as somehow the substance of a different tradition’.2 Predictive divination and religious prophecy combined with cosmological and environmental dimensions of eschatology in the thought and methodologies of those crossing the Atlantic to a so-called New World. A new Eden beckoned, often in expressly eschatological and soteriological terms: ‘Eden was the ideal to which colonial ministers looked as a pattern of ancient purity and a model of coming perfection in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’3