Some interesting reading I found. Link is here
http://www.jackfritscher.com click on witchcraft under search. The below is extracted from chapter 3.
Extracts of the file
In New England, the religious colonists perched on Plymouth Rock were desperate
survivalists. Afraid of the American forest, of the Indians, and of each other’s sexual urges, these
refugees–from a Europe terrified by Inquisitional witchcraft–transplanted the Calvinist-Jansenist
split between body and soul into a kind of sexual schizophrenia of good versus evil. From their
founding on religious tolerance, they turned in fear to a rigid Puritanism. Even good humans had
lewd bodies. Pleasure was wrong. Art was immoral; music, forbidden; clothes, plain not fancy.
Yet the colonial ideal was civil liberty and personal freedom. That meant trouble, because where
there’s free will, there’s a witch. In 1636, Anne Hutchinson, an upstart wife new to Boston from
England, was accused of heresy and witchcraft, because women met in her home where she
challenged Puritan teachings on moral conduct and piety. For voicing principles of religious
freedom and civil liberty later written into the Constitution of the United States, the transgressive
poet was banned in Boston, driven out of town on a rail, and forced to live on the frontier where
the First Church of Boston figured the Indians would–and did–kill her.
Jonathan Edwards in his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741),
preached masochistic resignation to a sadistic deity whose “Providence” was more to curse than
to bless, if it even bothered to curse. Denied God’s intervention, the Puritans, in their totally
harsh environment, created the first alternative American underground, because God’s failure to
answer their prayers made free-thinker Roger Williams’ naming of “Providence,” Rhode Island,
ironic. Theological irony always leads back to Satan, the original ironist. If God fails to respond,
the Devil is open for business. Irony is the Devil’s tool.
Driven by circumstance, some settlers turned to witchcraft for the comfort theology
denied them. As with witchery’s late 20th-century revival, it was the children who fostered the
colonial cults. It was the young who danced on May 1, 1627, around Thomas Morton’s priapic
May Pole at Merrymount colony in New England–before the Puritans chopped it down. It is the
physically hardy who understand Anton LaVey’s savvy 1966 axiom that Satanism is, in essence,
“libido out for a romp.”