God’s coun­try? How The Witch recalls America’s Puri­tan­i­cal past

Robert Eggers’ ​‘New Eng­land folk­tale’ and con­firmed hor­ror movie sen­sa­tion, The Witch, has earned reams of press on the strength of the authen­tic feel behind its Puri­tan freak­out, so it’s quite sur­pris­ing that – to this writer’s knowl­edge – no review­er has yet point­ed out that the film begins with a Bib­li­cal para­phrase: ​“What went we out into this wilder­ness to find?” (A cou­ple of explic­it­ly Chris­t­ian per­spec­tives on the film have at least reg­is­tered the line.)

In school, at least in Amer­i­ca, we’re taught just enough about the Puri­tans to appre­ci­ate the alle­go­ry of ​‘Young Good­man Brown’ or ​‘The Cru­cible’; like­wise The Witch’s sub­text is more intel­li­gi­ble to us than the reli­gion-soaked text itself. Reviews have ges­tured to the atmos­phere of fear and trem­bling before God, or, more up-to-date, the cul­ture of patri­archy and sus­pi­cion – and though these are impor­tant inter­pre­ta­tions that the film absolute­ly invites, what’s excep­tion­al about the film is that such read­ings fol­low nat­u­ral­ly from a vivid­ly 17^th cen­tu­ry men­tal­i­ty which has not been reverse-engi­neered to fit a mod­ern mean­ing. So much of what’s already been writ­ten about The Witch has nod­ded towards this by focus­ing on Eggers’ exhaus­tive research. But just how deep does Puri­tan belief run in the film?

Eggers has told sev­er­al inter­view­ers that the ker­nel of the film was his child­hood obses­sion with the 1692 Salem witch tri­als, and that his research mate­ri­als includ­ed accounts of demon­ic pos­ses­sion writ­ten by cler­gy­men Samuel Willard and the infa­mous Cot­ton Math­er – which, if grant­ed their three­score years and 10, only the youngest mem­bers of The Witch’s fam­i­ly would live to read.

It’s not nit­pick­ing to point out that this 1630-set ​“folk­tale” con­flates the tri­als endured by the first gen­er­a­tion of New Eng­lan­ders, born Eliz­a­bethans, with the tri­als con­duct­ed by their chil­dren and grand­chil­dren – or that the film’s time­line con­flates the Ply­mouth and Mass­a­chu­setts Bay Colonies. Decades and miles mean a lot giv­en the rur­al iso­la­tion and doc­tri­nal schisms of 17^th cen­tu­ry New Eng­land, and Eggers seems to know this as well as any­one. Anoth­er thing that’s come up a lot is the rough poet­ry of The Witch’s dia­logue, and the sophis­ti­cat­ed sen­tences with which a most­ly illit­er­ate fam­i­ly address­es each oth­er; it’s explained that ear­ly drafts of the script relied heav­i­ly on direct quo­ta­tions from pri­ma­ry sources, and that Eggers read the Bible in its entire­ty – the 1560 Gene­va Bible, not the 1611 trans­la­tion com­mis­sioned by King James I, whose arch­bish­ops drove the Ply­mouth Pil­grims out of England.

Sec­tar­i­an­ism isn’t inci­den­tal to The Witch – it’s the whole point. Aboard the Arbel­la en route to estab­lish­ing the Mass­a­chu­setts Bay Colony in 1630, John Winthrop, part of the wave of East Anglians head­ing west in the Great Migra­tion, deliv­ered the lay ser­mon ​“A Mod­el of Chris­t­ian Char­i­ty,” with its cli­mac­tic invo­ca­tion of the Ser­mon on the Mount:

The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own peo­ple, and will com­mand a bless­ing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wis­dom, pow­er, good­ness and truth, than for­mer­ly we have been acquaint­ed with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thou­sand of our ene­mies; when He shall make us a praise and glo­ry that men shall say of suc­ceed­ing plan­ta­tions, ​“may the Lord make it like that of New Eng­land.” For we must con­sid­er that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all peo­ple are upon us. So that if we shall deal false­ly with our God in this work we have under­tak­en, and so cause Him to with­draw His present help from us, we shall be made a sto­ry and a by-word through the world.

The ​“city on a hill” – long a favourite image of Amer­i­can pres­i­dents from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum – was meant to sug­gest this New World as a mod­el for the Reform, along Protes­tant lines, of the Old one. As the late Amer­i­can schol­ar Per­ry Miller wrote, ​“That purifi­ca­tion for which Cavin­ists on the Con­ti­nent and Puri­tans in Eng­land had striv­en for three gen­er­a­tions was to be wrought in a twin­kling upon vir­gin soil.”

It was for this rea­son that, in John Winthrop’s lat­er words, ​“The Lord hath brought us hith­er through the swelling seas” – anoth­er echo of the open­ing of The Witch, which con­tin­ues with head of the fam­i­ly William (Ralph Ine­son) ques­tion­ing his elders: ​“Leav­ing our coun­try, kin­dred, our fathers’ hous­es, we tra­vailed a vast ocean. For what?”

For what? The Puri­tans believed in a Calvin­ist ​“covenant of grace” between man and God. The infal­li­ble Lord will hold up His end; what was required of the Puri­tans for their sal­va­tion was belief. ​“If thou hast but a thirsty soule,” said the Der­by-born John Cot­ton (Cot­ton Mather’s grand­fa­ther), ​“and longest for grace under sense of thine owne droughti­ness, then God will not deny the holy Ghost to them that aske him.” That thirst, which hones the yearn­ing for God to an edge of des­per­a­tion, cuts through The Witch. The film’s char­ac­ters, like all Puri­tans, are con­stant­ly anx­ious lest they wor­ship false­ly. ​“Sure­ly if ever a the­ol­o­gy tor­tured its votaries,” Per­ry Miller wrote, ​“it was that taught by New Eng­land divines, and if ever mor­tal was dri­ven to dis­trac­tion it was the moth­er who, as Winthrop tells, drowned her child that it might escape damnation.”

He fur­ther explains: ​“The one sure cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of true faith was to be made from an exam­i­na­tion of what the soul desired: whether it craved holi­ness for holi­ness’ sake or mere­ly for the release from pain. […] Only a sin­ner despairs.” It is in this way that The Witch’s William is ulti­mate­ly weak. His exhaus­tion is both spir­i­tu­al (“I was born in cor­rup­tion”) and, giv­en his and his family’s near star­va­tion, phys­i­cal; indeed, the con­stant phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al toil of life in an uncivilised place seemed to par­al­lel for the Puri­tans the con­stant reflec­tion, self-doubt and self-scruti­ny required by their covenant.

The Puri­tans’ the­ol­o­gy demand­ed they keep eter­nal vig­il over their own thoughts. Thomas Hook­er described orig­i­nal sin through the exam­ple of chil­dren who ​“can know noth­ing nor learn to do noth­ing, yet they will eas­i­ly take in naughty words and tat­tle them when they know not what they talk.” The easy thought­less­ness with which Thomasin’s tod­dling sis­ter pro­claims her­self ​“The Witch of the Wood” is always on the tip of our tongues.

Thus the the­o­log­i­cal dis­putes did not cease in the City on a Hill. Even before the end of the 1630s, Hook­er split from Mass­a­chu­setts to found Con­necti­cut, and Roger Williams was ban­ished to what would become Rhode Island; the obscure dis­pute which opens The Witch is in keep­ing with a peri­od of anguished and inevitable debate over the one true path to grace.

The wilder­ness of New Eng­land was not just an oppor­tu­ni­ty, then, but a test of faith. Through­out The Witch, orig­i­nal­ly titled The Witch of New Canaan Woode, ​“the woods” are a place of per­il, where the chil­dren are warned not to go. Thomas Hook­er said: ​“I know there is wilde love and joy enough in the world, as there is wilde Thyme and oth­er herbes, but we would have gar­den love and gar­den joy, of Gods owne plant­i­ng.” We cul­ti­vate corn in the gar­den, rather than pick apples in the woods.

In his 1670 ser­mon ​‘A Brief Recog­ni­tion of New-Eng­lands Errand into the Wilder­ness’, Samuel Dan­forth elab­o­rat­ed on this theme, explain­ing the same pas­sage from the Book of Matthew with which the film opens: ​“John began his Min­istry, not in Jerusalem […], but in the Wilder­ness, i.e., in a woody, retired and soli­tary place, there­by with­draw­ing him­self from the envy and pre­pos­ter­ous zeal of such as were addict­ed to their old Tra­di­tions” – the wilder­ness is for his flock, as for William, a place free of men incon­stant like reeds, and of men ​“clothed in silken and cost­ly Appar­el.” (In Samuel Willard’s account of the demon­ic pos­ses­sion of Eliz­a­beth Knapp, which Eggers would have read, the Mass­a­chu­setts teenag­er like­wise says that the Dev­il promised her clothes of silk.) But, as Dan­forth warns:

To what pur­pose did the Chil­dren of the Cap­tiv­i­ty upon Cyrus his Procla­ma­tion, leave their Hous­es which they had built, and their Vine­yards and Olive­yards which they had plant­ed in the Province of Baby­lon, and return to Judea and Jerusalem, which were now become a Wilder­ness? was it not that they might build the House of God at Jerusalem, and set up the Tem­ple-wor­ship? But how shame­ful­ly did they neglect that great and hon­ourable Work for the space of above forty years? They pre­tend­ed that Gods time was not come to build his House […].

It was around this time – some 40 years after fac­ing the per­ils of the sea and arriv­ing in the wilder­ness – that the New World expe­ri­enced its first witch tri­als, in Con­necti­cut. For the sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion of Puri­tans, born in the New World, hard­ships like crop fail­ures and wars with the Indi­ans – and polit­i­cal dis­ap­point­ments like the fail­ure of Cromwell’s Protes­tant rev­o­lu­tion – were a sign that their fore­fa­thers’ work build­ing this Jerusalem was yet to be com­plete. The Witch push­es up the time­line of the Puri­tan witch hunts, but retains their fear­ful logic.

The Puri­tans knew that witch­es exist­ed because they knew, as Per­ry Miller explains, ​“that Satan can sim­u­late an angel of light and lead men to destruc­tion by giv­ing them false con­fi­dence.” They were pre­pared to see them because that doc­tri­nal uncer­tain­ty was ​“aggra­vat­ed among the Puri­tans to a fren­zy by their appre­hen­sion lest they be swin­dled of true grace with a pre­ma­ture and nat­ur­al coun­ter­feit.” (This appre­hen­sion gave us Con­necti­cut and Rhode Island.)

From the Con­necti­cut witch tri­als of the 1660s, from Salem, from Willard’s account of the pos­ses­sion of Eliz­a­beth Knapp and Cot­ton Mather’s accounts of the pos­ses­sions of Martha Good­win, Mer­cy Short and Mar­garet Rule, Eggers has tak­en a lot for The Witch: accounts of ​“fits” and coor­di­nat­ed spasms of accusato­ry hys­te­ria; mys­te­ri­ous cuts and bruis­es; ​“blood covenants” and lev­i­ta­tions. Most of all, he’s tak­en the bone-deep Puri­tan log­ic of witch hunt­ing: sin caus­es afflic­tion; repen­tance is achieved through con­fes­sion. In Salem, witch­es were hanged on the basis of ​“spec­tral evi­dence”, the accused per­se­cut­ed for tor­ment­ing the accuser with a demon only they could see. Against this, you can­not prove your inno­cence, because afflic­tion itself is proof of guilt.