A GOAT FOR AZAZEL
199
that she was afraid to die alone, someone must die with her. Even
in
this state, she paraphrased a psalm so brilliantly that Mather
was amazed again, for the last time. She resigned herself to death,
prophecied Indian wars and a great tragedy upon the country,
and recovered.
Her brothers and small sister, without Martha to inflame
them, had been reduced to their usual behavior. Mather sent
her home.
Here Martha's personal history ceases, but not the conse–
quences of this fateful period of her life. She became, Mather
recorded merely, very docile, very silent; and remained a sub–
missive Christian girl. He made a legend of her, and the drama of
Martha Goodwin and Bridget Glover took hold of the popular
imagination and was recalled again and again during the Salem
Witchcraft, four years later.
Mather preached his sermon on the nature and reality of
witchcraft, and afterward published it, an initiate statement of
the inner organization of the witch cult
in
New England, and else–
where, its rules, ceremonies, feasts, and dark purposes. He was
gradually persuading himself that the putting to deatP of witches
was a blood-sacrifice tending to placate the Devil. His mind was
a little confused between the role played by the ancient Hebrew
scape-goat and an obscure doctrine of the early Christians that
Christ shed his blood not as an offering to God the Father for the
remission of sins but as an act of propitiation to the Devil on behalf
of mankind. A passagl( from the witchcraft section of his
Magnalia
Christi Americana
is poetically applicable to Bridget Glover's part
in the Goodwin episode: "When two goats were offered unto the
Lord (and only unto the Lord) we read that one of them was to
fan by lot to Azazel ... it is no other than the name of the Devil
himself."
