Deciphering Cherokee ritual imagery deep in the caves of the American South
By WILL HUNT
Monday, November 04, 2019
On a spring afternoon in 2017, archaeologist Jan Simek led a group of graduate students into the dark, wet mouth of a Tennessee cave. They slipped past cave crickets and ducked under a colony of bats clinging to the ceiling. When they came to the end of the passage, the group belly-crawled through a crack in a wall and emerged in a small chamber. Simek angled his headlamp over the chamber’s walls to reveal hundreds of strange images carved into the stone: a serpent with antlers, a mud wasp with delicate wings, an entire flock of birds that seemed to soar across the wall. The images had been engraved by Native Americans 1,200 years earlier, during what archaeologists call the Woodland period (1000 B.C.–A.D. 1100), when hunter-gatherers were beginning to settle into an agricultural lifestyle. When the group eventually retreated toward the exit, one of Simek’s students, a tall, quiet man named Beau Duke Carroll, lingered in the chamber. He was staring at a small carved figure of a man with wings and a sharp beak. Carroll is Cherokee, a member of the Eastern Band born and raised on Cherokee-owned territory in North Carolina. His ancestors once called this part of Tennessee home. Carroll pulled from his pocket a pouch of tobacco that had been consecrated by Cherokee elders and sprinkled it over the cave floor, then he turned and crawled back out.
Twelfth Unnamed Cave, as this cave is known, is one of more than 100 caves in the woodlands of Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky where, in recent years, archaeologists have uncovered a vast trove of prehistoric art. The Unnamed Caves—so-called to obscure their locations from looters—contain extraordinary images of humans, animals, celestial beings, and phantasmagorical creatures. They take the form of carved petroglyphs, charcoal pictographs, and mud glyphs traced into soft walls. The oldest artworks go back more than 6,000 years, but most were made during the Mississippian period, between A.D. 1000 and 1600. Like the renowned Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, the artworks in the Unnamed Caves appear in what archaeologists call the “dark zone,” the deepest stretches of a cave, beyond the reach of natural light. The ancient artists reached these chambers by squeezing down long passageways and climbing on ropes or wooden scaffolding, all by the faint light of torches made of river cane. Simek and his team have spent years documenting the Unnamed Caves, recording and mapping each image, trying to comprehend what drove the artists so deep into the dark. To find answers, Simek has recently joined forces with Cherokee scholars such as Carroll, who are combining scientific archaeological practices with deep-rooted traditional tribal knowledge. Together, they are bringing life to the ancient artworks in ways no one had thought possible.
The first dark-zone art in the Southeast was discovered in 1979, when two local cavers shimmied down a cave passage in Tennessee and noticed an image of a bird incised into a mud wall. One of the cavers happened to have studied Native American archaeology and recognized the imagery from statues, bowls, and weapons excavated from burials at Mississippian mound cities such as Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis. The iconography was typical of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, the term given to a common set of religious practices and symbols that spread through the Southeast during the late Mississippian period. For rock art researchers in North America, the cave, dubbed Mud Glyph Cave, was a revelation. They had seen many examples of Native American rock art painted on cliff faces and carved into the walls of canyons, but never in the pitch-dark depths of caves.
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Dark Zone Depictions
When Simek arrived at the University of Tennessee in 1984, he was intrigued by the findings at Mud Glyph Cave. He had begun his career excavating caves in Europe and cherished his visits to Lascaux and Altamira, peering in the dark at 17,000-year-old images of reindeer, horses, and bison galloping across the ceiling. “I’d look up at those paintings and just tremble,” he recalls. He wondered what secrets the limestone hills of Tennessee might hold.
Simek focused his search on the landscapes stretching beyond Mud Glyph Cave, including the Tennessee River Valley and the Cumberland Plateau, both of which are honeycombed with caves. He spent long summer days bushwhacking through the forest in scorching heat, dodging timber rattlers and slapping at chiggers as he searched for caves. As a newcomer to Tennessee, Simek was still learning to read the landscape, so he recruited a team of local cavers and amateur historians, people who knew the land intimately. It was not long before they began to find caves containing traces of prehistoric visitors—charcoal streaks from cane torches, ancient footprints, and images engraved on the walls. “Once we knew what to look for, we began finding art everywhere,” Simek says. He saw engravings of owls and a type of fish called gar, reliefs of turtles, and even portrayals of men playing stickball, a ceremonial game played by Mississippian peoples. Each year, Simek and his crew discovered more new sites and added to the catalog of Unnamed Caves.
In Europe, early twentieth-century archaeologists had developed a theory that the artworks at Lascaux and other caves were the visible remnants of prehistoric religious practices. Simek saw hints that the Unnamed Caves had also, perhaps, been the sites of religious rituals. In Eleventh Unnamed Cave, for example, he discovered the ceiling was studded with more than 100 fist-sized gobs of mud that contained half-burned stalks of river cane. The ancient Native American artists, it seemed, had set the cave’s interior ablaze with prehistoric sparklers. Sometimes Simek would slip into a chamber and find ash fallen from torches thousands of years ago preserved in the cool mud.
As Simek and his team explored more and more caves and recorded the iconography and location of each image, they began to detect patterns. Images carved closer to the cave entrance tended to be clearer, more realistic representations—humans holding bows, for example—while the deep, hard-to-reach galleries contained images that were more enigmatic, such as men with bird wings and panthers with eagle talons. “They seemed to be moving from mundane to transcendent,” Simek says, “from visible world to underworld.”
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Dark Zone Depictions
From time to time, Simek found himself staring at a cave wall that had been deliberately scratched in an almost frantic manner, without any attempt to create a figure. It seemed that interacting with the walls was, in itself, a significant activity. Sometimes he came across images of human faces drawn on walls alongside large hands, as though the artist were portraying a person pressing against the wall from within. To Simek, the images looked like beings who lived beyond the rock wall reaching out to the viewer. He imagined that the ancient artists treated the cave walls as a veil between the earthly world and the supernatural world beyond.
Simek knew that all of this was conjecture. Like the cave paintings in Europe, the artworks in the southeastern woodlands were created well before the beginning of recorded history. “With prehistoric art, we’re always speculating,” says Simek. But, unlike the paintings in Lascaux and Altamira, where all direct knowledge of the artists has been lost to history, the images he was finding in Tennessee had been made by people whose descendants were known and who, in some cases, still lived near the caves. Simek wondered if the caves might still hold a place in the memory of Native Americans—but he didn’t know how to test this notion.
Then, in 2015, Carroll enrolled in the master’s program in archaeology at the University of Tennessee, where Simek was the head of the department. When it came time to write his thesis, Carroll turned to a site in northern Alabama called Manitou Cave. There local cavers had made a startling discovery almost a decade before.
The mouth of Manitou Cave opens on the side of Lookout Mountain, above the town of Fort Payne, which, during the nineteenth century, was the site of a thriving Cherokee community called Willstown. On a recent morning, Carroll and Simek hiked a mossy trail up the mountain. Carroll, now a Cherokee tribal historic preservation officer, led the way. Together they slipped into the mouth of the cave, where they were engulfed by a heavy, wet darkness.
The Cherokee relationship with caves is intimate—the name Cherokee is said to mean “People of Cave Country”—but fraught. From boyhood, Carroll had been taught by elders that even the smallest step into the mouth of a cave was the beginning of a spiritually potent and potentially dangerous endeavor. “Everything in a cave is the opposite of the surface world,” says Carroll. “It’s dark, it’s chaotic. Things are unpredictable.”
For much of the last two centuries, Manitou, which is privately owned, has been a tourist attraction renowned for its towering stalagmites and soaring chambers in which the cave’s late nineteenth-century owners would host candlelit dances. Close to the entrance, the cave walls are covered with graffiti. As Carroll and Simek moved deeper into the cave, they passed layers of looping signatures dating to the late nineteenth century alongside more recent exclamations of “Roll Tide,” the University of Alabama’s rallying cry, left by local teenagers. Eventually they clambered beyond the tourist route, following the path of a burbling stream until they reached the last chamber, some three quarters of a mile from the entrance. Carroll illuminated one wall, revealing a curious tableau of engraved text. At first glance, it resembled the Latin alphabet, but a closer look revealed unexpected flourishes and serifs. In fact, the characters were part of the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system whose characters represent syllables rather than vowels and consonants. It was developed in the early nineteenth century by the renowned Cherokee scholar Sequoyah—also known as George Guess—as the written expression of the spoken Cherokee language. Sequoyah’s syllabary was a landmark achievement, the first time in recorded history an individual indigenous person had developed a writing system for a strictly oral language. While the precise details surrounding the development of the syllabary are elusive, historians do know that Sequoyah and his family lived in Willstown.
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Dark Zone Depictions
Simek had been aware of the inscriptions since 2006, when they were first spotted by local cavers, but no one knew what they meant until Carroll undertook to translate them. Carroll had learned to read Cherokee in school, but because the language varies from region to region and has evolved over generations, portions of the text escaped him. He spent months working with Cherokee historians and tribal elders, showing them images of the text and gradually piecing together their interpretations. When Carroll finally presented his findings, Simek was stunned. The inscriptions described, in rich detail, a religious ritual performed in the cave nearly two centuries earlier.
Deeper inside the cave, Carroll cast his lamp beam over one stretch of neatly painted script and read aloud: “on the thirtieth day of their month April 1828.” It was the date on which the ritual’s participants visited the cave. “Their” referred to the calendar of the encroaching white settlers. Carroll continued reading with only the light from his lamp penetrating the dark, pointing out where the visitors identified themselves as “the leaders of the stickball team.” The ball game is still played by Cherokee people today—Carroll himself had grown up playing it. Much like lacrosse, stickball is played by two teams using sticks with baskets attached to move a ball through goals at either end of a large field. But it is more than just a game—it is a symbolic reinforcement of the Cherokee cosmos, an homage to past warriors, and a training ground for future warriors. The Cherokee call stickball “the little brother of war.” A single contest could last multiple days and would be punctuated with religious ceremonies in which a medicine man led the players to a secluded place to perform rituals. During these ceremonial intermissions, which Carroll knew from ethnographic literature as well as from personal experience, the ballplayers danced, prayed, bathed in smoke, and cleansed themselves in sacred spring water. The inscriptions in the cave made reference to some of these very rituals. Carroll guided Simek to an inscription engraved in the wall next to where the cave’s stream bubbled up from the earth. “We call it ‘going to water,’” said Carroll. He was quiet for a moment, as he and Simek listened to the echo of the stream in the dark. “Where water comes out of the ground, you could say it’s like a portal to the spirit world.”
Many of the inscriptions in Manitou Cave startled Cherokee elders because they were so sacred, referencing religious practices that Carroll could not speak about publicly. On one wall, Carroll found the signature of the medicine man who led the rituals—“the man of authority,” as he calls himself in the inscription. The medicine man was Richard Guess, the son of Sequoyah. At the time of Guess’ visit with the stickball team, the Cherokee were facing a cataclysmic upheaval. Just two short years later, President Andrew Jackson would sign the Indian Removal Act. This law required the Cherokee to leave their homeland and migrate to territory that later became Oklahoma on the journey known as the Trail of Tears. A number of Cherokee, though, took refuge in the mountains of North Carolina, eventually becoming the Eastern Band. Carroll suspects that Guess and the Cherokee ballplayers, with the threat of removal looming, traveled so deep into the cave and took such great pains to record their visit in order to leave a record of their practices for future generations. “They wrote this to be preserved over time,” he says.
Before exiting the cave, Carroll and Simek paused in a high-ceilinged hall where, high above the tourist graffiti, is an inscription. It reads ᎠᏴᏏᎵᏔᏍ, or a-yv-si-li-ta-s, Cherokee for “I am your grandson.”
“They’re addressing the Old Ones,” says Carroll. Then he explained something curious: The inscription was actually written backward, the symbols moving from right to left.
“They didn’t write it to be read from down here,” he said, gesturing to the cave floor. The intended readers, it seemed, were the spirits of ancestors on the other side of the stone.
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Dark Zone Depictions
Archaeologists have long used oral history and ethnography to help them understand the past. But Carroll’s findings have opened an entirely unprecedented line of inquiry, in which indigenous practitioners of a ritual have left written accounts of their own ritual practices, in their own words. “They are telling us that this was a ritual space,” says Simek. “It’s not speculation. We know.” Carroll recognizes that he cannot necessarily apply contemporary Cherokee beliefs to the imagery in the Unnamed Caves. Yet he also knows that many of his tribe’s traditions are rooted in the stories and beliefs of older, ancestral tribes who inhabited this landscape long before the Cherokee. On occasion, when Carroll visits an Unnamed Cave with Simek, he finds imagery he recognizes from tales his grandparents told him. Many Cherokee stories, for example, revolve around characters known as the Thunderers, celestial beings known for their ability to transform from human to animal—man to hawk, man to bear. During that first visit with Simek to the hidden chamber of Twelfth Unnamed Cave, when Carroll saw the engraving of the man with wings and a beak, he had thought of the Thunderers.
Recently, Simek and Carroll traveled together to Dunbar Cave, an eight-mile-long cavern in middle Tennessee that lies on one branch of the Trail of Tears. At the end of a winding passage, they came to an expansive hall. When they reached the back wall, they crouched together before a charcoal painting made during the Mississippian period, around a.d. 1300. It was of a man, stretching seven feet long. Instead of feet, he had large animal paws with sharp claws—he was changing shape, transforming from human to animal. Were they looking at an ancestral expression of a Cherokee Thunderer from 700 years ago? Perhaps. They can never know for certain.
Shortly after their visit to Dunbar Cave, Simek and Carroll learned that a park manager had found an inscription in the Cherokee syllabary etched into a wall not far from the shape-shifting figure. Carroll is not yet sure what the characters say, but he understands their significance. In the early 1800s, as his ancestors walked the Trail of Tears, they paused to visit this cave and leave their mark in a place that had long inspired reverence—a place where their ancestors had found both communion and solace since the earliest days.
Will Hunt is the author of Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet.
Archaeologists hunt for evidence of a 17th-century English family accused of witchcraft
By MARLEY BROWN
Thursday, October 10, 2019
In the fields belonging to Malkin Tower Farm, outside the village of Blacko, in Lancashire’s borough of Pendle, stands a solitary tree where small charms, fruit, and even the odd dream catcher are known to appear. These offerings are left behind by amblers on countryside strolls who are aware of the farm’s association with the notorious Pendle witch trials. In 1612, nearly a dozen people from this scenic region of hilly pastureland were accused of witchcraft, convicted, and hanged in the nearby city of Lancaster. Though they took place more than 400 years ago—nearly a century before the better-known witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts—the trials continue to captivate an eclectic mix of scholars, tourists, and neo-pagans. Researchers now conducting excavations at Malkin Tower Farm are hoping to find archaeological evidence of the witches themselves. The task is a daunting one, since material remains of magical practice are often ephemeral and difficult to distinguish from everyday objects. It also requires an understanding of the Lancashire in which the condemned lived, which was beset by religious and social upheaval, as well as substantial changes in traditional modes of rural life.
The team, led by archaeologist Charles Orser of Ontario’s Western University, chose to investigate Malkin Tower Farm because it shares the name of a property where the family most closely associated with the trials, the Devices, are known to have lived. The location Orser selected is only one of the possible locations for their home. No standing buildings from the seventeenth century—and no tower—survive at the site, and the exact location of the Device family home was never recorded. But in this part of the world, where farms are handed down over generations, place-names persist. “The names of individual fields, in particular, can be very ancient in this area,” says Malkin Tower Farm owner Andrew Turner, who, with his wife Rachel, operates holiday accommodations at the property. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the name ‘Malkin’ is actually quite a bit older than the 1612 trials.”
The farm’s current cottages, which sit on the lower slopes of a hill and look out over a vista of pastures, stone walls, and small lakes, date to the eighteenth century. Orser chose to investigate a field directly behind them, hoping to find evidence of earlier buildings. A 2018 field season based on geophysical surveys didn’t turn up much, but the team has now encountered what Orser says are the remnants of a demolished residence. “Clearly where we’re excavating now is a tumbled house, there’s no question about it,” he says. “And I can imagine that the local authorities would have wanted to demolish a house that they believed was associated with evil.”
The story of how Malkin Tower came to be associated with the devil’s work is recorded in a 1613 volume entitled The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. The history was written by Thomas Potts, a clerk at the Lancaster Assizes, the court where the Pendle witches were charged and condemned. The narrative, whose bias toward the prosecution is clear, describes the events as follows: On the 21st of March 1612, a young woman named Alizon Device was begging on the road leading to the village of Colne when she met a traveling peddler named John Law. She asked Law for some metal pins. He declined and, shortly after his refusal, suffered a collapse of a sort that would now likely be diagnosed as a stroke. Law recovered well enough to make it to the local inn, or to a house nearby, where he told of his encounter. He claimed that, before his collapse, the young woman had cursed him. Deciding to take the case to the authorities, Law and his family contacted the local justice of the peace, Roger Nowell, who took statements from Alizon; her mother, Elizabeth Device; her brother, James Device; and Law’s son, Abraham. The initial examination must have piqued Nowell’s curiosity. Seeking other local reports of witchcraft, he questioned Alizon’s grandmother Elizabeth Southerns—who was in her 80s, blind, and known in the community as “Old Demdike”—as well as another octogenarian, Annie Whittle, nicknamed “Old Chattox.”
By April 4, according to Potts’ history, Nowell had heard enough. He committed Alizon Device, Old Demdike, Old Chattox, and Old Chattox’s daughter, Anne Redferne, to prison in Lancaster Castle to await trial. Fears of a witch conspiracy came to a head when reports reached Nowell that, on April 10, fellow witches and friends of the Devices and Old Chattox attended a meeting at Malkin Tower. There, they were said to have plotted a prison break, discussed spells and hexes to cast against the authorities, and planned to blow up Lancaster Castle. Nowell extracted confessions to the effect that the meeting was not a one-off, but rather a regular witches’ “sabbath” held at Malkin Tower. He then arrested several more people on suspicion of participation. The accused were alleged to have used forms of malevolent magic to curse humans and animals to cause them disfigurement or death, to have created clay effigies representing victims, and to have cultivated supernatural entities, called “familiars,” that were said to appear in the guise of animals, to do their evil bidding. The trials were held on August 18 and 19, 1612, by which time Old Demdike had died in jail. In the end, Alizon, Elizabeth, and James Device, Old Chattox, and six others were found guilty and executed.
Documentary evidence of the Device family essentially disappears after the executions, even though the youngest member, a small girl named Jennet, survived the trials. Jennet was probably around seven or eight at the time and is thought to have been forced to give evidence against her sister, brother, mother, and grandmother, a rare example of a young child’s testimony being admitted in an English trial. It entered common law as a precedent that is still studied by legal scholars today.
Once Orser had identified archaeological evidence of a domestic dwelling, his next task was to determine what artifacts might possibly be related to magic. “One of the problems is that you are often really just looking for mundane, quotidian objects,” he says. “You might be lucky and find, say, a specific type of German stoneware jug made during the period called a bellarmine, which was used as a protection device against witchcraft. Or you might find the pins sometimes put in those bottles, such as the kind Alizon Device supposedly asked John Law for.” More often, though, he explains, archaeologists look for artifacts arranged in certain ways, or objects that have marks on them that might be symbolic.
Amid the ruins of the house at Malkin Tower Farm, the team has unearthed what they believe is a hearth area and, in the same vicinity, a mostly intact pipe bowl. Orser hopes the bowl will soon be confirmed by specialists to date to the early part of the seventeenth century, the very time that the Device family may have been living there. The researchers have also discovered a substantial assemblage of coarse earthenware vessels that would have been used for serving food and drink, as well as for collecting and storing milk. Many of these fragments appear to date from the same period as the pipe. While nothing Orser can point to as being overtly magical has yet been found, some intriguing possibilities have begun to emerge. “In addition to the well-preserved pipe bowl, we found a piece of ceramic that is almost mirror-like,” Orser says. “If you’re familiar with scrying, a practice of looking into a surface to get visions, that’s what this will make you think of.” For reasons still debated by scientists, many people report hallucinations upon staring into a mirror, or a similarly reflective surface, for an extended period. “This fragment could be the right age, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Orser says. “It practically reflects.”
In Potts’ account of the trials, he makes much of the allegation that Old Demdike and the rest of the Device family created effigies, called “pictures,” out of clay, which they used to manipulate and cause pain to their victims. On the west side of the house, Orser’s team has uncovered a number of nuggets of pure clay. “There were hunks of something like modeling clay that were clearly distinct from natural clay deposits,” Orser says. “It was very unusual in terms of the surrounding soil.”
The large volume of coarse earthenware Orser has recovered may be a result of the site’s use as a dumping ground following the demolition of the house. The number of later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ceramics indicates the former homestead may have been a trash heap for at least 100 years after the building was razed. “We just can’t figure out exactly where all of this stuff could have come from,” Orser says. “There’s a tavern nearby, which may have been contemporaneous with the 1612 trials, but it’s a long way to bring your trash.” He suggests the placement of the dump might be due to lingering negativity in the minds of local people, even generations removed, resulting from the witch trials. To Orser’s surprise, one excavation layer contained a nearly intact, handblown glass bottle, for which he now hopes to obtain a date.
To look out from Malkin Tower Farm today is to survey a landscape of neatly divided fields that has not changed substantially in almost 400 years. The last time it did, Old Demdike was alive to see it. The latter part of the sixteenth century was a tumultuous period in the Pendle area. Common lands were rapidly being converted into private pastures, a policy called “enclosure” that began in the late Middle Ages and was widespread across Britain by 1612. Many people in Lancashire also provoked the ire of both the Crown and the Church of England for their stubborn refusal to abandon Catholicism.
Local Pendle historian John Clayton has spent years consulting property deeds, legal documents, and municipal records held in the Lancashire Archives. He says that the social, religious, and economic environment of the time may have created an atmosphere conducive to a witch hunt. “There was currency inflation throughout the 1500s, as well as a series of weather-related crises in the agricultural system,” Clayton says. A 1507 law had given local landowners the opportunity to acquire land in Pendle on lifetime leases. The tenants who managed to acquire newly enclosed lands immediately became the haves, while smallholders and those living on the margins became the have-nots. A century later, in 1607, King James I (r. 1603–1625) added fuel to the fire by decreeing existing leases invalid, provoking a scramble on the part of landowners to legally repurchase their property. “This meant that only the wealthiest landowners had the opportunity to officially take on their land,” Clayton says. “and that they also had the opportunity to take on the land of their poorer neighbors.”
Clayton is among those who do not think that the current Malkin Tower Farm is associated with the Device family. Based in part on place-names referenced in the law clerk Potts’ account, he is beginning to explore an alternative site a few miles away. He suggests the owners who built the current Malkin Tower Farm in the eighteenth century may have appropriated the Malkin Tower name, perhaps because of a similarly named field already existing at the property. Clayton and Orser do agree, however, that archaeologists should be looking for a dwelling that was probably demolished and subsumed by a larger estate. “It’s possible Demdike was on a holding her family had held for a generation or two,” Clayton says. When they couldn’t afford to pay the extra money to buy the land after James I canceled all leases, he suggests, it may be that another family took over the land and allowed the Devices to stay in the building, which was called Malkin Tower.
Clayton points out that other communities across England faced similar tensions over property ownership at the time, and thus resentment over access to land resources is not enough to explain accusations of witchcraft. Additionally, while tens of thousands of people are estimated to have been executed in continental Europe during witch persecutions from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, in England that number appears to have reached only into the hundreds. That witch scares were relatively uncommon in England raises the question of what specific circumstances might have been to blame in Pendle and for other witch hunts that occurred intermittently over the seventeenth century.
Part of the answer lies in the personal beliefs of and laws passed by James I, who, in 1590 (when he was King James VI of Scotland, but not yet king of England) attended witch trials in North Berwick, East Lothian. In 1597, he published Daemonologie, a treatise on various forms of black magic. In ensuing years, the monarch became obsessed, for a time, with stamping out witchcraft, during a period that coincided with the Church of England’s general policy of repressing English Catholics, a large community of whom lived in Lancashire. “Possibly the whole 1612 trials, and surely the Potts account of them, were specifically designed with James I in mind, to show support for his views and to curry favor at court,” says Orser. Government and church officials had only to find a way to conflate what they considered heresy with witchcraft. “These families living on the fringes in rural Lancashire were hanging on to Catholicism. They may not have even been doing it as a protest but just because it was the way things were,” Orser says. “In some instances, what are referred to as ‘spells’ are pieces of old Latin prayers.”
Another explanation for the Pendle witch trials may lie in forgotten folk practices that often go unmentioned in official historical documents. Seventeenth-century Britons were mostly illiterate, lived by the rhythm of the agricultural calendar, and fought illness without the assistance of modern medicine. For decades, many historians subscribed to the notion that as Christianity replaced indigenous pagan religious systems in the British Isles from the late Roman period onward, magical superstition died out. Archaeologists, however, do find objects, markings, inscriptions, and other evidence of rituals and practices that should, they say, be considered magical. “When people start talking about magical invocations, they rarely try to define magic,” says archaeologist Christopher Fennell of the University of Illinois. “One definition of magic is that it is any kind of personal supplication from a once-dominant religious system which got pushed off center stage by a new system.” Christianity, Fennell says, by way of example, marginalized paganism in England, but individual rituals surviving from those belief systems continued to be carried on in private spaces. “The problem for archaeologists,” Fennell says, “is when it’s private and for personal reasons, you have tremendous opportunity for variation, and it’s hard to know what to expect.”
Adding to the difficulty for Orser and his team is that the overwhelming majority of magical evidence is found in surviving buildings and not in the ground. “If you’re excavating in a house, or doing a preservation survey, you’re more likely to find something,” Orser says. Commonly documented practices in England include the deliberate caching of shoes in walls, or the etching of markings of three—an allusion to the Holy Trinity—into fireplace mantels to ward off accidental blazes. “There’s a chance you could find something like that in the soil, like a cat skeleton or horse head buried under the threshold of a building,” Orser says. “But otherwise, how can one tell certain mundane objects from other mundane objects that were used in magical or spiritual ways?”
It is impossible to know just how effective people thought these practices were, but their neighbors clearly believed that Old Demdike and Old Chattox had some kind of power, as they both made their living traveling from farm to farm to heal sick livestock. “Farmers didn’t necessarily understand why their cattle were ill, and believed these women had the ability to cure them,” Orser says. “The other side of that coin, of course, is that if you can cure, you can curse, too.” A sudden outbreak of disease in a community or a spate of personal misfortune could easily be blamed on such a healer, known in the parlance of the time as a “cunning woman.” There needn’t even have been any evidence of malevolent intent, Fennell says, for such traditional folkways—even if they were widely accepted in the community—to be recast as evil. “You have people who are practicing folk religion without concerning themselves with Christian concepts of Satanism or diabolism,” he says, “but they’re in danger if they’re practicing their own folk religion at a time when tensions arise within their community.” All that may have been required for any folk magic practices the Device family was engaged in to be misconstrued as witchcraft was for an authority figure, such as justice of the peace Nowell, to become involved. “Beginning in the late 1500s,” Fennell explains, “both ecclesiastical and civil authorities completely reconceptualize everything and persecute anyone they find problematic, often elderly women who weren’t necessarily thinking about going against Christianity, but were engaging in traditional practices intended to manipulate spiritual forces, whether to protect or to harm.”
Determining whether a family of witches lived at Malkin Tower Farm will require a careful cataloging of the hundreds of objects Orser and his team have recovered from the hillside. Even when this work is complete, arriving at a definite conclusion may never be possible. And who is to say that even if some incontrovertibly magical artifact were to appear in the ground, another such object wouldn’t also appear at the next farm over, and the next, and the next after that.