Hekeziah Massey (hɛk'əzɪ.əh ˈmæsi)

Hekeziah - Williams (a.k.a. Nahab)

Historical accounts of witchcraft in New Jerusalem focus generally upon the figure of Hekeziah Massey, convicted of witchcraft in 1692. Born in Knaresborough in Yorkshire, England, in the August of 1613 as Hekeziah Williams, she was married at the age of sixteen to a 'common peddler' named Aloysius Massey. Aloysius hanged at York Assizes in October 1640, where he stood accused of murdering three women whom allegedly had been in his employ as prostitutes. His twenty-seven year old wife narrowly escaped following Massey to the gallows by insisting she'd known nothing of where the dead women's wedding rings and personal effects, which she had tried to sell, had come from. After Aloysius Massey's execution Hekeziah, who may well have also been shunned by her appalled community, over the next decade may have justifiably acquired a reputation as diabolist or witch. During the aftermath of Cromwell's revolution and the English Civil War, which raged from 1642 to 1646, in 1652 the widowed Massey felt compelled to flee the wave of witchcraft trials that had accompanied the new regime and relocated to the town of Manchester, New Hampshire, where the striking thirty-nine year old soon re-established both her reputation as a sorceress and as a harlot or adulteress. Nor did the tales of her voracious appetites and monstrously perverted inclinations see decrease as Hekeziah aged to a repellent crone of more than seventy, the remnants of her former beauty only making evident the ravages which she had brough upon herself by her malignant personality and practices.
While rumours of her sexual activities may be no more than the malicious gossip which a woman living on her own in a small town might commonly be subject to, there may be some corroborative evidence in Hekeziah's clear familiarity with the Kitab al Hikmah al Najmiyya, even prior to her correspondence with Roulet, and with the outré passages of sexual philosophy which it in part contains. It is not known how Massey first became aware of the book and its contents, although it may be conjectured that she had at some point in the year preceding her escape from England been allowed to thoroughly peruse the freshly-published Hali's Booke, even if she at that time was unable to afford its purchase.
In 1683 she moves to the Plantation of Missituk. In February 1692 the Salem Witch Trials begin, and by March the witch panic reaches New Jerusalem. Hekeziah Massey is accused of witchcraft and sent to Salem for trial, but she disappears from her locked cell before she can be executed.
Accounts of Massey’s trial survive in the records of Essex County, albeit in fragmentary form; some scholars hint that the records were intentionally expurgated. The account of her trial before the Court of Oyer and Terminer contains multiple lacunae, though a summary of her case is presented by Reverend Ward Phillips in his Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New England Canaan.
In recent years the personal papers of several participants of the trial have been relocated by antiquarians, offering alternative perspectives on the trial, but all have remained in private hands. Massey was unapologetic in her testimony; she mocked Judge Hawthorn and others in the community, confessed her participation in witches’ Sabbath (on Meadow Hill, Sackomskit {now Aylesbury} Hill, an the ill-rumored island in the Misituk River, and a few other isolated spots around New Jerusalem), revealed the secret name given to her by the Black Man (‘Nahab’*), and happily discussed how certain lines and angles could “break through the world into the spaces beyond”. The testimony of more than a score of her accusers also survives, including frequent reference to her weird, furry familiar Browne Jenkinne, a large and deformed rodent of some kind. * _{Etymologists are at a loss to explain the meaning of this name.}
Massey is best known, however, for her escape from the gaol in Salem, which is often referenced in discussions of the Salem Witch trials, including by Cotton Mather. While most modern authors attribute this seemingly impossible event to bribery or lax supervision of the jailed witch, contemporary authors who visited her curiously adorned cell—its walls daubed with enigmatic lines and curves in the witch’s own blood, or who attempted to interview the insensate jailer who babbled madly about a talking rat—believed her escape to be an undeniable proof of Satanic aid.
Hekeziah Massey divulged the names of the other witches in New Jerusalem, but not those of her own coven, to the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Only a few were ever brought to trial, her confession regarded as suspect as she named some of the village’s most respected citizens. The shadow cast by Massey’s accusations was a long one, however, and several of those named by her would later be the victims of mob violence. Despite the best efforts of Reverend Ward Phillips and his ilk, witches lingered in New Jerusalem long after the trials in Salem. While less often mentioned by modern authors, researchers may uncover disquieting hints about a large number of New Jerusalem’s early citizens.
One of the fragments of the court records of the New Jerusalem Witch Trials has Hekeziah Massey’s confession.
Some excerpts:
10’th Sep’r 1692
Q: Goody White say you to be a witch.
A: Ay, and Mistress White.
Q: How came you so?
A: The Rev’d Rice of my towne would get produce of my land and said I could cipher well in my accounts and he would teach me Euclid.
Q: What, geometry?
A: Ay. And having learned, one day a Savage called Misquamacus came to me in a dream and offered to show me more angles should only I meet the Black Man in the ravine by the Meadows Hill and sign his book. I was affrighted, yet the dull people of the towne knew not such angles as Misquamacus told of so I went one night to see if the dream be true. And Misquamacus was there, and the Black Man, and others, and they bid my sign, and I sign’d. And the Black Man gave me Browne Jenckin to carry messages to him when I would. At the moons we would dance and make angles …
Q: Did you teach others?
A: Ay, at the stones on the isle in the Missatak, the angles touch’d a supernal world.
Q: Mean you infernal?
A: Ay, infernal and supernal. Angles touch all worlds. We used the angles to summon the bearded worm from the far seas, which taught me how to draw circles and step into spheers to free my thoughts from my body and be as shapes from Euclid. You of the towne grasp not the spheers and can only see the circles which imprison you. Yet I be free to travel the spheers and follow the lines of tangent to other worlds among the stars.
Q: I understand thee not. What hath angles to do with witchcraft?
A: Nor shall you without you sign the book. Yet angles are behind all the world. Angles shew the way to hidden things and parallel lines extend not yet to infinity but to the other worlds. Lines can be made to shew paths invisible so to find good things in the earth and the woods, and angles conjoined about a person can make him ill or hale as the angles meet. I sought to teach Goody White the angles but the stupid thing grasped them not and understood only herbs and simples …
Q: When would you meet on the isle in the Missatak?
A: At the quarters and the 8s and when 17 came round.
Q: What say you?
A: As the locust come in 17 years so the stars come round in bunches of 17 weeks and we would hold special festivals on the isle. And when 8 and 17 met or 17 and the quarter. The Black Man would favor us and attend.
Q: Who else was there?
A: Nay, you may not have that from me.
Q: You shall die for it.
A: I think not…

Date of Birth

31 of October

Year of Birth

1613 CE 342 Years old

Birthplace

Knaresborough, Yorkshire, England

Sex

Female

Gender

Woman

Presentation

Feminine