Halloween - WEIRD NEW JERSEY - Mt. Holly - Witches - New England - SHARKS!

Today, Sunday, October 24th, I was thinking about the Witches Ball in Bordentown. Sadly, it was held on October 6th and so it is over and I can't let you know about it so you can attend, however, it made me think about witches in New Jersey. The only place I know of that sports any witchcraft history is Mount Holly and what I learned a long time ago about that, was that it was probably a journalistic hoax!

According to an old issue of WEIRD NEW JERSEY, one of my former favorite magazines, the article describing a witch trial in New Jersey may have been a satirical one penned by Bejamin Franklin to mock Philadelphia's rural New Jersey neighbors' ignorance. How I miss Weird New Jersey - and I may be forced to subscribe again. I think I left off when the founders moved to Pensylvian but I am forever imprinted with that magazine! I always see odd things in the shape of the state of New Jersey such as oil spills and rotted holes in trees, missing fur patches on my cat who has autumn allergies, coffee spills on my coffee table!

So many places I found out about via WEIRD NEW JERSEY magazine became places that I loved to visit on a regular basis such as the New Egypt Flea Market! Haven't been there in ages. First my car got old (I just bought a new one two weeks ago) and then my eyesight got bad (Fuch's Dystrophy - inherited cornea disease), and then the pandemic came and everything closed anyhow.

Like moving on after a broken heart, I have new interests and I read new magazines, but today, Sunday, is devoted to the Sunday New York Times and in the magazine section of the Sunday paper there was a FASCINATING article on SHARKS which have begun to proliferate along the New England Coast. More about that in a little bit. First, let's remember that New England was the locus of the witch persecutions in America. They flourished all over Europe from the middle ages however, and thousands of innocent women were tortured and murdered as a result. For the most part, as research has shown in the many articles I have read on the subject, the real cause of the persecutions was GREED and FEAR. As is so often the case, the vulnerable were targeted by unscrupulous neighbors, denounced, and after their persecution and murder, their land was confiscated. Needless to say, elderly widows were a freuequent target as were solitary elderly women living on the outskirts of villages and towns. Since it was not uncommon for people, before the advent of access to medicine, to practice herbalism, many elderly country women were wise in the ways of plants, plants that could cure and plants that could kill. There were, too, combinations of plants that worked as abotifacients and we all know that conservative powers then and now are terrified of the proposition of women controlling their own reproduction! Women without ecducation, employment, and burdened with many pregnancies and children, are women dependent and thereby controllable.

It has been my pleasure to have visited New England many times in past years, including Salem, Massachusetts, and Plymouth Plantation, the root of the Puritan invasian of North America. It wasn't only witches who were tortured and murdered, dissenters often encountered the same fate, as in the case of the nearly a dozen Quakers, including Mary Dwyer, who were condemned and hanged, yes, even here in the colonies where people had fled to escape religious persecution, by those very same Puritans! There have been many books and esssays about the very real peril faced by these traumatized Puritans fleeing their homelands - the raging seas, the immensity of the wild forest they encountered in the 'new' world, the original inhabitants of this land, who to these inexperienced Puritan colonists were nearly incomprehensibly alien, and the animlas including bears and wildcats and wolves. ,p/> In the aforementioned article on sharks in New England, once again, that stalwart of American literary classics, Moby Dick was mentioned. Since 1975, when I first saw Jaws, I have often wondered if the Great White Whale of Moby Dick, might not have been a Great White Shark which can grow to 20 feet in length, live for 70 years, and weigh thousands of pounds! Frankly, I have never been a fan of water or swimming, and despite a childhood spent visiting my Grandmother Mabel at Ocean City every Sunday and for weeks in the summer, I never trusted the Atlantic Ocean. Although the worse encounter I have ever endured at the seashore was with jelly fish, I never doubted for an instant that something larger and more dangerous could be silently slithering through the ocean currents looking for something to bite. The reason for the increase of sharks along the coast in New Englandat present is the unexpected consequence of the Clean Air, Clean Water, Ocean Conservation Acts of Congress of the englightend 1970's. The gray seals which nad nearly disappeared from New England are back and sunning their sleak torpedoe shaped bodies on the sandbars along the coast in the hundreds. This has brought large numbers of sharks to the area to feed on seals. Really, sharks don't want to eat us, boney unpalatable humans, and why would they when chubby seals are available, it is our wet suits and surfboard silhouettes that trick them into taking a bite of our bony bodies. And although the numbers of people killed in half centuries is still in the dozen range, we experience an outsize fear of this 'apex' predator, much as we once felt in regard to wolves.

As I have mentioned on many another Halloween on this blog, one of my lifelong favorite Halloween film festival movies has always been The Wolfman, with Lon Cheney and Claud Raines. "Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers at night, may turn into a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the moon is bright!" And there it all is - the power of herbs, our fear manifested in animal form, and our attempts to mediate it through our religious rituals!

I am sure I will be back to converse with you again before Halloween arrives, but if you want to connect, pleasue use my email rather than the comments feature. wrightj45@yahoo.com