What was the common definition of witchcraft in the seventeenth century?
Ray: That’s easy: a covenant with the devil. It was the mirror image of the covenant the Puritan was to make with God. Becoming a member of the Church was something you did as an adult. You signed a book of membership after being examined by your minister in the presence of the congregation and by affirming your kind of experiential, spiritual encounters with God, with Christian teachings in your life. The reverse was true, then, with the devil, throughout the documents. The devil would present a book, and you were to sign it. This was an act of not just religious aversion, but since it was a theocracy, a political aversion, so it was an act of betrayal. For that, if you were guilty, you were beyond the pale. The condemned witches were not buried in cemeteries. They were outcast. They were executed outside the town, beyond the borders of the community, because they were agents of a subversive force. Ferris: In Europe, between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, more than one hundr
