Cotton Mather
[related: Salem Witch Trials, Increase Mather, Onesimus]
Self-righteous and thin-skinned Puritan minister who served as head of the Congregationalist Old North Meeting House of Boston, a post previously held by his domineering father Increase Mather.
An aspiring Boston Brahmin, Cotton Mather was as a young man dedicated to somewhat anachronistic social and political causes. He, for a time, unsuccessfully pursued the presidency of Harvard College, a post also previously held by Increase. Cotton eventually found both purpose and notoriety in the cataloging and persecution of black magick. His exhaustive codex on the subject, the now-summarily disregarded Wonders of the Invisible World [1] (1693), advocated for the use of so-called "spectral evidence [2]" (sometimes poetically phrased " peaks of the spectral") in the Salem Witch Trials [3], resulting in the prosecution and violent murder of 19 men, women and children, some aged as young as five. In a slight that would come to irreparable sever their relationship, Increase Mather subsequently penned "The Return of Several Ministers Consulted", a co-signed essay in which he stridently rebuked Cotton's spectral tenet. Following additional failed attempts at gaining political and/or religious stature, Cotton Mather turned toward experimental science, becoming the first American to advocate for inoculation against smallpox - a system shown to him by Onesimus, an enslaved African in his employ.
- ↑ In this effort as well Cotton's father had preceded him: Increase Mather's poetic and thorough lexicon of witchcraft Remarkable Providences was published to great acclaim in 1684.
- ↑ Ex: certain birthmark shapes and coloration offered proof of Satan's oral blood leaching.
- ↑ Despite the modern stance that all evidence in the Salem Witch Trials was pure fabrication, Cotton Mather was able to document numerous mutually verifiable examples of possession, unexplained illness, and bizarre behaviour--thought now to be the result of convulsive ergot poisoning resulting from spoilt rye grain, an illness easily passed from mother to child via lactation.