The mammoth manuscript that I began thirty-five years ago, in 1974,
Satan’s Scourge,
A Narrative of the Age of
Witchcraft
in England and New England
1580-1697
by Lewis Putnam Turco
was finally published today, May 2nd, 2009. A number of people have ordered copies, which have been mailed, and many others have asked for details; here they are, together with the Foreword and Acknowledgments:
Product Details:
ISBN: 978-1-932842-26-5 (soft cover)
$39.95
Publisher: Star Cloud Press
6137 East Mescal Street
Scottsdale AZ 85254-5418
Web site: http://www.StarCloudPress.com
e-mail: StarCloudPress@aol.com
Date of Publication: May 2009
Page Count: 800+ including index
Format:
soft cover, ISBN 978-1-932842-26-5,
$39.95
jacketed cloth, ISBN
978-1-932842-27-2, $54.95
order on-line or by mail from
www.starcloudpress.com/SatansScourge.html
Phone: 480.609.0065 | Email Us | Fax: 480.951.5930
no extra charge for copies inscribed by the author
This is the first review of the book:
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
Satan’s scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697 is a book of history, a chronicle of the period when the Age of Sympathetic Magic, which had been the system by which mankind operated from time immemorial, was beginning to shift over to the Age of Science, “The New Philosophy,” by which the world would be increasingly governed from then forward. The main focus of the book is upon the Putnam family of Buckinghamshire, in England, from the birth of John Putnam, born in 1580, some of whose descendants would be deeply involved in the last gasp of sympathetic magic, the great witchcraft explosion of Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692, which is the climax of the book.
The volume not only looks at all the witchcraft cases in England and New England during the period covered, but it also tells the stories of the major scientists and Adepts of sympathetic magic (often the two were the same) in Europe and America. The effect is twofold: First, the method is strictly chronological, unfolding like a tapestry year by year. As one thread of the tapestry swells and tapers off, others appear and interweave with one another. Second, the history is told from the point of view of common people, the Puritans of England and New England primarily, but also the crystal gazers, alchemists, alleged witches and their accusers, and those ordinary citizens caught up in the webs woven by plotters, liars, “possessed” children and their parents, and, of course, the clerics.
Furthermore, this is the period when America was settled, when Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads carried out their Puritan revolution, and all the politics and machinations of the relevant sovereigns and courtiers of the period are also a part of the tapestry here woven.
One is probably saying to oneself at this point, “It’s too complicated and confusing.” But when one begins to read the book one discovers that things start out clear, and they stay clear throughout. Everything in it is true. All the incidents took place in the real world, according to my historical sources (which are exhaustive — A bibliography is appended), and this depiction of the Salem witchcraft trials is the most complete and accurate that has ever been written, many errors and misprisions having been corrected.
I wish to acknowledge those who have helped and inspired me in this project. The first person to encourage my writing on the subject was Dr. Eleanor Michel of Meriden, Connecticut, High School for whose 11th grade English class in 1950-51 I wrote an addendum — an extra concluding chapter, a postscript — to The House of the Seven Gables, in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne [http://www.nightsandweekends.com/articles/09/NW0900132.php].
At about the same time four of us at Meriden High founded the Fantaseers Science-Fiction Reading Club which grew to include (Rev.) Ben Barnes, Pierre Bennerup, Bill Burns, (Prof.) Lindsey Churchill, the late Phineas Gay, (Rev.) George Hangen, George Lallos, the late Jack Rule, (Rev.) Ray Staszewski, George Veillette, (Rev.) Arthur von Au, and Paul Wiese — the Black Thirteen who provided me with Faustian fellowship, evil escapades, vile volumes, and the opprobrious opportunity to do my second (very imaginative) writing on the subject of the Salem Village witchcrafts: A Senior Day skit, a photograph of which appears on page 139 of my book Fantaseers, A Book of Memories, published in 2005 [also by Star Cloud Press].
Next, I beg the indulgence of the Research Foundation of State University of New York for providing me with a Faculty Fellowship during the summer of 1974, under which I was to write a volume of poetry but, inasmuch as I had begun this book in the spring, I finished the first draft instead. I did nothing with it thereafter beyond query a few publishers who seemed not much interested in it because of its length, so I put it away until the spring of 2006 when I rewrote it as I typed it into my new MacBook Pro computer.
I wish to express my deep gratitude to several librarians for their help in my research: Eleanor S. Adams of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, for her early and kind assistance; Dorothy Mozley, Genealogy and Local History Librarian of the Springfield City Library, Springfield, Massachusetts, for her help with the Springfield witchcraft cases of 1646 and 1651, and Cecilia Caneschi, Reference Librarian of the Meriden, Connecticut, Public Library for her great help with the Benham Wallingford witchcraft cases of 1691, 1692, and 1697.
The description of the Vale of Aylesbury at the beginning of this book is in fact very largely that of Eben Putnam, not myself, taken from his Putnam genealogies (see Bibliography). Inasmuch as he explored the area, and I have not, I thought it as well to leave his descriptions largely as he wrote them. I thought it fitting, too, that this scholar of the Putnam family, who spent such enormous amounts of time and work researching his people, thus making the Putnams one of the most thoroughly documented families in America, ought to leave his imprint on these pages in some way other than statistically, for his two genealogies were published in limited editions (though I have made them available from University Microfilms International of Ann Arbor, Michigan).
Over the years I have met or known many people who are descended from the folk depicted here including my dear friend, the late poet Constance Carrier of New Britain, Connecticut; Curtis Disbrow, the husband of my sister-in-law Anne Disbrow of Meriden; my cousin-in-law Gary Getchell of Cedar Grove, Maine; Lindsey Churchill and the late Jack Rule, both Fantaseers; the Maine artist Margaret Macy, a descendant of Rebecca Nurse; the Cleveland poet Mary Oliver; the late novelist John Cheever, who angrily informed me in my living room in Oswego, New York, that the character Ezekiel Cheever of Salem Village was fictional, having been invented by Arthur Miller for his play The Crucible — John did not stop fuming until I showed him his forebear’s testimony in the Salem Witchraft trial records; my correspondent of almost forty years, the great fantasist Ray Bradbury, and there were two Drs. Mather, father and son (but doctors of medicine, not divinity — both Roman catholics!) in Oswego where I lived and taught for thirty-one years at the State University of New York College at Oswego, and where I wrote the first draft of this volume.
I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my wife, Jean, who helped me with the chore of working on the index of this book, the most grueling task she has suffered since the school year 1968-1969 when she carried most of the physical labor of typing and editing two manuscripts, The Spiritual Autobiography of Luigi Turco, my father, and The Literature of New York: A Selective Bibliography of Colonial and Native New York State Authors.
Lewis Putnam
Turco
Dresden
Mills, Maine
Tuesday,
December 2nd, 2008
REMARKS
Camden, Maine
March 31, 2009
To: Lewis
Turco
Dear Sir:
I have to admit enjoying your lecture of Sunday, March 29, in double time (military term) because of its double concentration on witchcraft and Reverend George Burroughs. Then seeing your volume, Satan's Scourge, on the front table I realized you may have written the most comprehensive modern treatment of the epic yet. And I suppose you have.
But prime purpose of this letter is to say I have begun to read your tome and greatly thank you for the labors you invested in it.
Sincerely,
Robert Manns
Playwright
Libby, Montana
Putnam Turco —
I just received Satan's Scourge, and what an enormous work it is. I've only had time to flip through it but already love an incident with two guys, a clay pipe and a horse's ass. 725 pages and over 80 pages of index! It is extremely rare that a piece of scholarship is also so readable. You are the right kind of writer to do scholarship; to show them that the material can be assembled and even analysed…and yet be a page turner.
If I can conquer this thing in a decent time range, I'd love to try a review. Is there some place you'd like me to try to get it in — a literary journal, maybe, and the name of an editor who would think the was a good idea? I'd like to help you sell it.
So congratulations on getting yet another major book out of your thickening brain.
John
Herrmann
Novelist
John,
Thanks for your great letter! Yours is the first response to the book that I’ve received from a writer, and it means a lot to me to hear what you have to say about its readability.
Lew
Lew, Your history makes
me breathless. It doesn't stop for even a coffee break. I don't know what I
could say about it other than it is a complete — over-complete — readable
tracking of a great evil by well meaning people — your relatives, mostly. I can
do a paragraph for Amazon.com, but I am not the reviewer for this. If you've
read any of Blake Bailey's biographies (most recent, Cheever, but the Yates
book is relentlessly complete) I would say that they are fine, but what's to
review? I guess I'm just not able to review anything other than fiction, and
then not all fiction, as I did the first review of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914
and could only review the awful language of the translation. I guess because
S's work has always been mostly history. But I will say that your Satan book
does not dramatize, and that's the stuff that I would pick up for reviewing. In
the end, the whole thing moves too fast for me to find a place to begin talking
about it. I will say that I was stunned at many of those really nutty women. At times your
narration seems to be slightly 17th century. Maybe not "your" prose
but your sources' choices of expressions? John Herrmann John, The dialogue in Satan’s
Scourge is the actual recorded
words of the original characters in it. What I did is go through the
depositions of the witnesses and the trial records, and if someone said that
something happened at a particular time, in a particular place and year, I
simply moved the incident being described back in the chronology to the point where
the witnesses said it happened. Therefore, nearly all characterizations of
people and descriptions of events are taken from the actual dialogues and
monologues of the people involved. That’s why the language in the mouths of the
people speaking it is archaic, because it is, indeed, archaic language. The only
characterizations of people in the book that I invented are derived from the
horoscopes I cast of the main characters on their birthdays (knowing
beforehand, of course, how things developed in their stories). I hope that does
two things: Gives the reader an opening sense of the adults those characters
would become and portents of the events in which they were eventually involved. I’m glad you like
the book. Lew
Beacon, New York
Congratulations, Lew.
I hope it fares well. I've talked it up to a few folks and passed on the link to your site for orders. I never wrote a review but I might get to that yet. Trying to keep a day job gets tough enough some days.
For me, it rekindled a fascination I had with the competition between magic, science, and religion. I had always thought that science won, and that was it — reason would reign for good. But our need or desire for religion and magic are like an addiction, and we must ever be watchful of that, just as a real addict knows that the bottle is not the solution, and causes more harm than the immediate pleasure or feeling of safety it brings.
For what it's worth, it reminds me of a song written by one of my favorite musicians, Neil Peart, of the Canadian band called Rush:
Witch Hunt
The night is black
Without a moon
The air is thick and
still
The vigilantes gather on
The lonely torch lit
hill
Features distorted in
the flickering light
The faces are twisted
and grotesque
Silent and stern in the
sweltering night
The mob moves like
demons possessed
Quiet in conscience,
calm in their right
Confident their ways are
best
The righteous rise
With burning eyes
Of hatred and ill-will
Madmen fed on fear and
lies
To beat and burn and
kill
They say there are
strangers who threaten us
In our immigrants and
infidels
They say there is
strangeness too dangerous
In our theaters and
bookstore shelves
That those who know
what's best for us
Must rise and save us
from ourselves
Quick to judge
Quick to anger
Slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice
And fear walk hand in hand...
Paul Austin
Software Tester
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