Cotton Mather's ImagiNation of New England

Cotton Mather's ImagiNation of New England

In Magnolia Christi Americana and The Wonders of the Invisible World, Cotton Mather makes an extremely homogeneous imagiNation of the colony of New England on the basis of the typological ideas, and such imagiNation necessitates his notorious support for the violent witchcraft persecution. Following John Cotton, who believes in the typological connections between certain events, persons, or things of the Old Testament [the type] and those of the New Testament [the antitype], Mather makes a typological analogy between ancient Israel and New England and emphasizes the role of New England in history as a fulfillment of the promises of the Scripture, naming the colony "New England Israel" and the colonists "New Israelites." In his imagiNation, the master signifier "New English Israel" retroactively quilts, reconstructs, and regulates all the historical elements of the symbolic space of New England. For Mather, America before the Puritans' settlement was Devil's territory, and his time is also the Devil's time just before Christ's Second Coming. He laments that his contemporaries are too easily forgetting Gospels, and demands that they. as the New English Israelites observe the New English Way. Mather notoriously supports the Salem witchcraft trials with the dream of purging the Devil's invisible hands that corrode the homogeneous Puritan order of New English Israel. His solution to the witchcraft crisis is for all colonists to be united as "New Israelites" under the Puritan order.