Poor Tituba! Because of your forced connection with a scheme and works which entirely baffled your comprehension, because of your forced disclosure of things you had witnessed and experienced behind the vail of flesh, your own body was imprisoned thirteen months, and two innocent women were doomed to death. Guileless and innocent, so far as connected with witchcraft, you was borne on by mighty forces to seem to act voluntarily, though in fact unwillingly and perforce, a prominent part in one of the most fearful scenes in human history. Man's ignorance of spiritual agents and forces in your day, together with the prevalent hallucination devil-ward, made you a humble and pitiable martyr to simple truth-telling. Some seeds in your simple story now gathered from out the chaff that has covered them for nine-score years, may soon be scattered over New England soil, from which, we trust, you above, and men below, may gather wholesome fruits of justice and truth.
Tituba's sister witch, as that slave's master called Sarah Good, may not have been regarded in her generation as possessor of any large amount of such qualities as her name is commonly used to designate. Still her neighbors doomed her to lasting fame by selecting her as the first person to be put under examination on suspicion of being a producer of Salem witchcraft. As a facile tool in supernal hands she may have been, and probably was, good in quality as well as name.
Indications that her spirit-form was susceptible of either easy elimination or wide radiations from its material counterpart, are contained in the facts that on January 20, 1692, the inner eye of Tituba saw this Sarah; on February 25, Ann Putnam, and on the 28th, Elizabeth Hubbard saw her apparition, or her spirit-form.
Man's "natural" or physical optics do not discern a spirit. Spirit, when not materialized, is discernible only by our inner or spirit-eyes; spirit is "spiritually discerned." The spirit forms, however, of embodied, living men and women, are not all equally discernible by clairvoyants. Generally, only such among flesh-clad spirits are readily seen by inner optics as are able to slip, or are liable to be drawn, or to radiate out, from one's ordinary integuments of flesh, or, at least, those only whose integuments are transparent of spirit-light. Only few, relatively, can either see or be seen readily and frequently by spiritual eyes. Eagles exist as well as owls and bats. And clear perception of objects by the former amid light that blinds the latter, is no proof either that the vision of eagles is perverted, or that the objects they behold are but creatures of fancy.